What motivates you? What moves you? What determines how you live your life?
When I talk to Jason about ideas and theology and the questions and theories swirling around me and in me, there is usually a point in the conversation where he can't help but ask, "What difference does it make? Is your life any different if you believe one way or the other?"
As I quibble over details, I have to ask his question "What difference does it make?"
Usually, the answer should theoretically be "It makes all the difference," but then I look at my life and the lives of others around me, and I have to say that people who believe on either side of a question usually live in about the same way.
Here's a perfect example of this quibbling and questioning and the perplexing case of what life looks like on either side of the theories: What happens when we die? As a Protestant Christian, I'm supposed to have a clear, undeniable answer to that. You know, the one that goes something like if we've accepted Jesus we spend eternity in Heaven with Him and if we have not accepted Jesus, have denied Him, or have never even heard of Him, we spend eternity in Hell. Maybe that clear, undeniable answer is right. There are certainly plenty of good arguments that it is, Scripture that does in fact seem to point in that direction, and years of tradition to support it. However, in my mind at least and in the minds of many others, there is plenty to call that clear, undeniable answer into question. Maybe nothing happens, and this is just all there is. Maybe there is a Heaven and Hell kind of situation but not the clouds and halos and fire and brimstone cartoon variations our culture imagines. Maybe there's an eternity that Christians will miss out on because we've gotten it all wrong all these centuries just like the Pharisees and other "brood of viper" types always did even when they were looking Jesus in the face. Maybe Jesus IS the Way but in a different way than the exclusive evangelical Christian way we've interpreted Him to be. Really, who honestly knows? All I can do is choose one to believe the best that I can, based on what I discern from Scripture, academics, prayer, or whatever method of logic, learning, or gut-following I decide to employ.
And there's Jason's question, "What difference does it make?" Well, it makes all the difference. If Jesus is the Only Way, in the exclusive way that we believe He is and everyone who doesn't know Him is destined to an eternity without Him, how should we live? We should be living no less than extremely, radically, only to make His name and way of salvation known. That's it. There shouldn't be any other ambition, any other goals, any other way to spend a moment. Jesus said to leave behind family, to "let the dead bury their own dead," to take up crosses. He used such strong language of leaving all else behind to follow Him. If He is the Way, that's all life should be, right? I mean, what's the point of anything else? Everything else is just a distraction, an earthly idolatry, and a waste of precious time that could be used to make sure that we and everyone else around us goes to Heaven in the end.
If the truth is something a little less extreme and exclusive than that, though, life is a little different. There's less urgency, less need. At least when it comes to the question of eternity, that is. In the here and now, perhaps there is more urgency, more need to make life beautiful and satisfying for ourselves and for others in the world. If nothing happens when we die or nothing that we can be certain of or fully control, then we just make our best possible choice and try to have a good life and, if we're nice and generous, make the lives of others nice too.
Now, before any of my readers or I write-off the second option for its lack of the truth of Christ, think about it. What do most Christians claim to believe about the question of what happens when we die? Most claim the Heaven through relationship with Jesus only route. Now, how many Christians live like that's true? Seriously. If we believed it's true, really honestly, deeply believed that in our hearts, why would we have any job other than that of a missionary? Why would we bother praying for new jobs or for our finances when we should be praying for salvation for humanity and selling everything we do have to give our money to the poor? Why would we marry or produce children when there are so many already alive and yet unsaved people to attend to? How selfish to create more people-- with the possibility that they may go to Hell no less!-- when there are plenty of other people who need our time and energy to know Jesus.
Back to the word motivation. Back to the question What motivates you?
I think about Jehovah's Witnesses walking through our neighborhoods in 90+ weather wearing suits and knocking on doors to tell people about what they believe. I think about people going to war or strapping bombs to themselves in the name of religion. What motivates that? Why am I not motivated like that?
The question bothers me deeply. Why am I not motivated? Why am I not bursting to go to the ends of the earth to tell the Gospel of Jesus? Why do I not tell everyone I know about what Jesus means to me? Why am I not knocking on my neighbors' doors to see how I can help them and if I can share my testimony with them? Why am I not thoroughly convinced that that is the right course of action for my life?
I always go back to this idea in David Dark's The Sacredness of Questioning Everything:
My religion is my practice. It's what I do. (pg. 35) Will we allow a religious critique of our practice of religion? Are we up for a redeeming word? Show me a transcript of the words you've spoken, typed, or texted in the course of a day, an account of your doings, and a record of your transactions, and I'll show you your religion. (pg. 38)Even if I am a very religious Christian who goes to church several times a week, reads my Bible twice a day, and prays for everyone I know, there is still going to be a huge part of my life that involves going to work, fixing dinner, eating, cleaning the bathroom, shopping, watching TV. What then is my religion? The religious part of my day or the rest of it? Is the goal to eliminate everything else so that only the religion remains?
Jason has another recurring question, "Can you be a Christian and still like baseball?", meaning can there be any other enjoyment in your life or anything else to take your time if you're truly committed to Christ?
I'm stuck somewhere between the answer that everything is Spiritual and the answer that nothing that looks different from the lives of the Apostles is Spiritual.
What difference do the questions make? None if they're just questions, things to ponder, read about, write about... I want to believe that if I could answer some of my questions conclusively, I could figure out the best way to wrap my life around those answers, to live so that the records and transcripts of my days point to a religion that follows Jesus completely.
Right now, though, it's all just questions and books and day-to-day... thinking about teaching, checking emails from LOFT and shopping for new clothes, reading the Harry Potter series, thumbing through stacks and stacks of teaching materials and making plans, spending time with my husband and friends and family, decorating and cleaning my house again and again, keeping up with reality shows on TV, staying busy and struggling not to be busy, going to church, wondering and theorizing about God and how He works, being a generally good person and trying to get better, struggling to refine my passions for writing and teaching into being something worthwhile in the world, and trying to find the balance of how to spend the hours of this life in the best way possible... all the while knowing that it isn't fair all I have when others do not, all the while knowing there's so much more to be done in this world...
What motivates me? What should motivate me? And what should it motivate me to do?
