Lately, I’ve been trying to keep desire afloat.
Driving down the freeway after another Saturday of work and selfishness, through again was reminded that all of this—meaning workplace and vocation and purpose and ambition (both worldly and non-worldly)—are essentially meaningless if they’re not shared, reciprocated, given away.
I’ve come across people who’ve walked in similar shoes, though now much older and wiser and stable with the benefit of perspective, sharing with me about the cost of their sacrifices—friends, relationships, family, rest, marriage—for what?
“This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
I don’t want to make these same mistakes; our time here is about loving God and people. We often become overtly consumed with ourselves, and when we do, the world around us feels like a very small, cold place.
There are times when I feel all this is silly. All this striving, rising and falling, waiting for a “big break” and dressing up to go to fancy award ceremonies at corporations where you need a sword to slice through all the inflated egos just to make it to the snack table. For example, millions of us are addicted to email, bondservants to our inbox and blackberries.
Who emailed last night?
What’s going to happen next?
Is she going to email back?
Did we land the project?
Did the client pitch work?
It’s exhausting. But yet, at times it’s energizing, because we were made to work, it points to something more, like we might actually be on the right track, that these things are not meaningless, after all.
There’s tension here; it’s hard to make sense of it.
Our drummer Andy made a haunting point a year ago, one I couldn’t quite understand then, but am beginning to grasp. He was lamenting on our human limitations, how frustration floods in when we can’t seem to fulfill our yearnings on earth. He talked about Heaven, how perhaps we’ll be able to fulfill the things that seem just beyond our reach here.
His reference point was music, perhaps mine is, too, coupled with writing, video, business, the list goes on. My heart and soul yearns for something that I can’t find the words for.
Yesterday we recorded audio of a brilliant president of a progressive furniture company, talking about innovation and inspiration and collaboration and all these great things on the future of commerce, and it gave me life.
“It can’t be meaningless, it can’t be,” I thought. Then I think of the songs I love, the movies that keep me thinking days after watching them, the times when nature seems to cast aside everything else, a time of worship where it feels like we’re standing in the temple courts.
“Better is one day in Your courts, than a thousand elsewhere.”
Eating chicken in the kitchen I think of the Genesis curse on the land, painful childbearing and the consequences of the fall. Then I think of the sacrifice of Christ and fulfillment of the law and dream of the redemption of the workplace and a new Heaven and new earth.
And I must go back to work.
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