Great is Over Rated

Those of you who have known me over the past six years and have had a recent conversation with me also know that I have changed substantially in that time span. I am not the same person I used to be. My world view is different and my personality is perhaps a little more refined from years of depression. The world will forever look different to me.

While I have many thoughts that have developed during this time--and continue to develop--I have one that I want to share with you today. Great is over rated.

First: a little background. Dreaming about future possibilities and being able to trust God have always come easy to me--like second nature. I am not a skeptic at heart. I am an optimist, an idealist, a romantic. Consequently I tend to be very impressionable.

Needless to say, my secular and Christian upbringing left a fairly large impression upon me. They combined to tell me that the future was mine to make of it what I could. My only limitation was my own lack of imagination--or faith. While I suppose that there is some validity to a high school teacher pumping up their 9th grade class with dreams of possibilities--dreams of great things--there is also much that was overlooked.

As a Christian from a Christian family, I grew up hearing incredible Bible stories. I heard about Daniel in the lions' den, Moses and the Red Sea, Joseph and his dreams, David and Goliath, Abraham and his son, Noah and his ark, Esther and the kingdom, Jesus and his disciples, Paul and his journeys...the list of great stories seems endless. I was encouraged to emulate these people and their faith that did great things. I was told that God could do great things through anyone. This may be true, but much has been overlooked.

Because I am impressionable I believed that I could find fulfillment through trusting God to use my life for great purposes. Now I didn't care if I got recognition or actually did something great--I just wanted fulfillment in life. I was led to believe that fulfillment came from the future--from a great future. Isn't that part of the message contained in the American Dream?

Now, five years later, I am here to say that great is over rated. And if great is contained in the future then maybe the future is over rated as well. It seems that my demographic (20 somethings) are consumed with the future--with transitioning to the right place, with establishing a family, with establishing something for our future. Our lives are on hold for what is to come. We have over looked the present. How many of us could say that right now our life has closure as a whole? How many of us could (this is a morbid thought) die today with closure--with some sort of resolution that our life has been enough? Our personal sense of fulfillment is probably attached to something yet to come in our lives--something great in the future.

I am not suggesting that we should give up goals and dreams for great things in the future (see description of my personality above). I can't help but to dream about future possibilities...but not with priority over the present.

I just had a conversation last week with my father-in-law over a book that he had been reading. It was about living in the present--not the past or the future. 'Present' was used as a play on words. It meant a gift as well as a moment in time. I used to think of unwrapping my future as a gift--but my present? Are my stack of bills to pay, my arguments with my wife, my work, mowing the lawn and worrying about finances really a gift?

Take a look at this quote by William James that I found at the back of The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander:

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.

I am not only done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes, I am tired of them. They make me tired. I only have one life to live and it is not in a past that I can do little about nor is it in an abstract future that exists only in my head; my life must be lived in the gift of the present moment--with intrigue and with abandonment. I cannot hold out for something else when all I ever have is the present.

I find that as I venture to do this I am way behind in my ability to do this. I have never been taught how to value "those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual." I have not been taught how to be satisfied, content and fulfilled with what life has to offer right now. I am venturing in to new territory. I am venturing into my present.

As they say in the Dead Poets Society, I want to learn how to suck the marrow out of life. I hereby give myself freedom to leave the 'greatness' of the future behind in order to abandon myself to the gift of my life in the present--a life that is complete at any one moment.