Didn't it always seem shallow or mildly depressing whenever someone said "Life is basically (fill in the blank)"? Especially those "life is all the little things" statements, when someone rattles off all the boring things they do all the time, like "chocolate, television, watching the game with a friend, driving your kids to work, beauty and art, sex, music, having the first cup of coffe in the morning, dance..." You get the idea.
Why do so many people have so many different ideas of what life is? Are they all wrong?
What if they're all incomplete?
What if everyone is hinting at something far, far, greater?
Let's imagine, for a moment, that life is something no one can understand, because it's just too big to encompass anything we've ever conceived. Let's call this bigness "Biggie".
Now, Biggie is the ideal way to live life. By that I mean, people who know of and aim for Biggie incorporate all the things listed up there into their lives plus way, way more. The problem is that other people get hung up on individual aspects of Biggie, and mistake those things for Biggie itself. So they'll life a "good" life, but ultimately it will be incomplete, because they are incorporating only one or two parts of Biggie.
Could you imagine if Biggie were alive? If it had feelings and emotions? How heartbroken it would be if so many people didn't get all of it because they got hung up on part of the whole experience?
That sadness would increase exponentially if Biggie was also our creator. If way back when, Biggie said "There's so much good and huge about me, I want to share it,", and then made all of us. But part of Biggie is freedom and choice, so Biggie gave us choice as well, so we could share his goodness even more profoundly and intimately. But then we decided (collectively), we'd rather life was about us and a few small things than about Biggie and all his bigness.
"Biggie" is God.
One of the saddest things to me is how people misunderstand what and who God is. For FSU, we were required to read (as freshman) a book called "This I Believe...", holding statements of belief from various famous thinkers, philosophers etc. Obviously I completely ignored it, but when we received it I flipped open to a random page and read someone writing, "Not believing in God is how I have room in my life for...", and then they listed a series similar to the one 4 or 5 paragraphs up. That pains me when I read it, because somewhere (quite possibly Christians), that person got the impression that those things exist outside of God, when they are actually part of the bigness that God is.
Living God means living all of those, and even more and bigger and better things yet.
Something to keep in my mind as you start living life in this New Year!
