Spiritual Optometry

You know what? I've got a pathbreaking insight that is going to shake up the discipline of the social sciences forever...

Life is tough.

But if you think that was revolutionary, try this one on for size...

Life is wonderful.

Let's face it: at the end of the day, all of us are going through similar experiences through one venue or another. As the widow of Charles Lindbergh noted (I'm paraphrasing out of blatant laziness in my desire to research): if suffering created wisdom, then all the world would be wise. Yet we know that the world...indeed, even our next door neighbor might not be particularly wise.

This is the beauty of the gospel--it grants us the privilege of living the deliberate life. A life sharpened by emotions, dulled by pleasure, and fulfilled by love. The gospel invites us to laugh, mourn, and cry (out of both joy and pain). To use C.S. Lewis' tired analogy about how the gospel is like the sun (he doesn't believe in it b/c he sees it but because he by it he sees everything else), the gospel gives us a divinely inspired narrative. Why so much emphasis on "the plan," after all...we all know that there's madness in the world far beyond what we Americans can comprehend beyond the token CNN news clip?

Because the existence of "the plan" isn't the point--many of those have been offered. It's the wonderful duality of the plan that so blesses us: we aren't just a class of the created order to fulfill the whims of a distant sovereign, we aren't just another stage in life's scheme only to be winnowed off as weak link. We have the impertinence to maintain that there's more to life than simply praising a distant Logos (which is what all of Christianity basically does, even if they don't realize it) or than trying to out-Darwin our neighbor after we convince ourselves that we are the "fittest" meant to survive economically, etc. In such circumstances, yes, life pretty much sucks...especially if you're the one being Darwin-ed. We can convince ourselves that such things are "reality," but then again, Zion is a "reality." Reality can be a democratic experience...

In other words, the beauty of life does, even in a gospel sense, depend on the eye of the beholder...the question remains as to how often we go to our spiritual optometrists...