Been thinking. Thinking long and hard about life. Some accuse me of thinking too much and they’re probably right.

Been struggling. Struggling long and hard within life. Like most people, I don’t like struggling. I don’t like asking hard questions of myself. Don’t like staring into the sky and wondering why.

Why.

At some point in your life, you’ll sit down, look around, and ask, “Is this it?” Most of us will ask that question from the comfort of a nice home surrounding by nice things, the kind of things that the majority of the world could never afford.

At some point in your life, you’ll sit in church, look around and ask, “Is this it? Does this sum up the abundant life?” You’ll talk to a few folks on the way out of your nice church, load your nice kids into your nice car, and drive home with your nice spouse to your nice house. And it will all be so very nice. The kind of nice you’ve heard from your earliest days. A “gold watch and a handshake” kind of nice when you retire from the company. A nice retirement, a nice set of grandkids, and finally, a nice corpse.

The words of a song came back to me:

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone

Subdivisions —
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions —
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights… † 

The Bible put it this way:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
—Luke 9:57-62

You get handed a dream on a silver platter: this is what life is. It looks a lot like the American Dream. At first, you accept it, but then Christ comes along and something happens to you. Suddenly, the cover over the universe rips away and you can see endless possibilities. The opinions you trusted now pale. Perhaps the future isn’t pre-decided.

So you throw yourself into a different work—for a while.

But you want love, and with love comes responsibility. You get married. For a while, the new dream lingers. Yet time brings changes, a nest, children. You sign for the mortgage, then the nice house, followed by the nice furniture. You buy the life insurance policies—just in case. You buy the health insurance. You work, and work, and work to keep it all from turning to dust.

Then, just as suddenly, the veil falls over the universe and what once burned brightly flames out.

And you don’t know how it happened.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.
—Matthew 13:7

A field of thorns desires nothing more than conformity to thorniness. All it understands is thorns. Anything not thorns must be consumed by them. The imperative is thorns.

So you wake up one day and realize your entire life looks like thorns. Your neighbor’s life does, too. So do the lives of most people in your church. It’s all thorns for as far as the eye can see. Nothing but weeds that will someday be thrown into the fire and burned.

It is said that some serious-minded people approached Charles Finney with a concern. Not enough of his converts went to the mission field, and the serious-minded people wanted to know why. Finney explained that many of these converts went back to their towns to be godly parents, godly mayors, godly bricklayers, and all manner of godly people living out a godly life in some now-godly town in America.

I suspect that this answer mollifies even Finney’s sharpest critics today. Most of those critics may despise Finney otherwise, but from what I see around me, they sure seem to aspire to be godly, serious-minded people in whatever town they went back to, be it big or small.

Finney’s answer seems good to most of us. Isn’t that the exact American Dream life we’ve carved out for ourselves? Opinions all provided. The future pre-decided. We’ll just be Christians wherever we are, and if that means being a suburban Christian in a nice quarter million dollar home we’ll be paying for the rest of our lives, who’s to say that’s wrong?

I never heard anyone say it was wrong. I never heard anyone questioning it at all. And that’s the problem.

I never wanted to put my hand to the plow and look back. But I did. I suspect most of us did.

What role models did we have? Sure, we knew young singles and marrieds who counted the cost. We may have even been those people at some point. But somewhere along the path we made a choice. And that choice was to go the way everyone else does. The wide way.

Who can blame us though? Where were our examples of going the narrow way? Doesn’t everyone conform? And so what if some people sit gauzily musing on their front porches about what might have been?

Do any of us escape this? Or is this the lot of every last one of us?

We wonder why the Church in this country is so ineffective in the face of the world’s onslaught, but which of us has actually counted the cost? In some ways, we’re like half-born people. We started out on the journey, but on seeing what it was going to cost us found ourselves hung up between worlds, neither here nor there.

So we live with the agony of being stuck half-born.

I sit here typing on my computer with more stuff than my ancestors two hundred years ago could possibly imagine, but I wonder if I sold my soul to get here. It bothers me, too, that I knew better, yet I could not escape the black hole’s gravitational pull. Worse, most people around me, especially the Christians, live as if no black hole exists. I don’t know which state is worse, knowing or not.

I don’t want to be half-born, but honestly, I have no way of knowing how to finish the process. Neither do most others.

I look for guides, but so few exist. In too many cases, even those leaders succumb. I find many of them to be young, doing the kinds of things I did when I was that radical young prophet/servant. And like me, they’ll probably fall into the same trap when the kids show up. That may sound jaded, but I can’t escape the inevitability of it; I’ve seen it happen more times than I wish to count.

So what does it mean to live a life in America 2007 that never looks back once the hands fall upon the plow? What does a life free of thorns look like? What does it mean to be fully born?

I thought I knew, but then again, so does everyone else.

†  “Subdivisions” by Rush. Lyrics by Neil Peart.

{Image: “Miami” – © Alex MacLean }