Are We There Yet?

Within half an hour of setting off on a long car journey – from Wales to the South of France, for example, a small voice from the back seat would be heard asking the question we parents dreaded. “Are we there yet?”  I’ve often wondered if this is more of a philosophical question than one which has to do with mileage and the hours yet to be endured. For a child, a twelve hour car journey is a significant chunk of her remembered life. I also wonder if it’s not a question we are all asking in regard to all kinds of things – politics, the economy, a solution to environmental melt down, or even in regard to the end of our own lives – the latter, especially. Are we there yet?

Children are particularly interested in things pertaining to life and death. So 'Are we there yet' leads quickly to other questions. What happens when you die? Where do you go? And does such a place or dimension permit you to pick up where you left off in regard to relationships, human or animal, which were suddenly terminated by death? Happily for most children, death is, in a sense, a kind of continuation of life as they know it, but better.

If they are right, it is still quite difficult to gauge what the meaning and purpose of life now might be, especially given the very vague demarcation line which exists between life and death as children often perceive it. Life is still open-ended for them, less finite, more infinite, so they can see far greater distances, on the eternity spectrum, than most of us can until, perhaps, we reach a very old age. Then, we are returned to the conceptual space remembered from childhood, perhaps without realising that this is what is happening.

In the later mid-life years, before we reach this stage, a picture starts to emerge from what until now might seem an incoherent, and often disconnected, series of life events. The questions now being asked are not so much to do with what happens when you die, as what is the meaning of life? What is its purpose? Looking back over the years, it seems that on the whole, we have been far more anxious about purpose than we have about meaning. Purpose has concrete implications. It has to do with ‘making something’ of oneself or even, in today’s parlance, of ‘getting’ a life. But unlike purpose, meaning is something that simply has to be allowed to happen to us. It is a given.

Underlying our aspiring for purpose lies a considerable amount of anxiety. Anxiety is another word for fear. So when it comes to the purpose of life, we are afraid that we might have ‘failed’. The people we fear most in this regard are usually parents, then our own peer group and all those significant others who in some way exact standards of achievement, even if these expectations only live in our imagination. Furthermore, we often imagine that these particular fears will vanish once those who have instilled them in us die, but this rarely happens.

On the other hand, insofar as we live and die in Christ, we are already on the other side of the demarcation line between life and death, meaning and purpose, and between time and eternity. We are already partly in the other dimension. Far from being frightening, this dual-time state of ‘existence’ ought to be a sign of hope for us in the present. For one thing, it cuts into our ideas of linear time, especially in regard to our earthly life-span. When it comes to eternity, we are in the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We depart from linear time into a time-frame in which the meaning of life as we know it, has nothing to do with purpose in the ordinary sense of the word.

 In Christ, and in the context of eternity, meaning and achievement bear no relation to each other. We do not need to achieve, or to purpose our life now with a view to fulfilling someone’s expectations, or our own. In God’s economy, the meaning and purpose of our life comes in any given moment when a thought or action is purposed for the good of others and for the good of the earth God created. But, as I said earlier, it is the allowing which is important. Allowing is not the same as striving for something.

Allowing God’s purpose for our life is a little like the biblical concept of Wisdom. Wisdom, the living Spirit of God, has been around for eternity, ‘dancing’ with God. We are invited to enter into that dance. But we have to listen carefully for its measure, for the things which allow Wisdom to be danced through us in our earthly life time. When it comes to what happens when we die, the person who is wise, and who has taught others wisdom, will, as scripture promises ‘shine for all eternity’.  (Dan. 12:3) We’re nearly there.