Harris Creek Baptist Church

I have been on a sabbatical of sorts. That’s why I dropped off the face of the planet. I had a great time and I read alot. I did other things, but unfettered reading time is worth double to me. My friend Rob says that the time you sleep, say between 7 am and 8 am is like double time. Take away from the beginning, but don’t touch that sacred hour. For me, uninterrupted reading time is that sacred. It is even better than that last hour of sleep. I read a biography of John Adams, by Pulitzer prize winning Author David McCullogh. What a great book. I’m just telling you now that if I had been there in place of John Adams, the Union Jack would be flyin’ high over this land. I couldn’t have done all he did.

And out of those men, the founding fathers of our country,c ame a great dream “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” John Adams struggled with the idea of all men being created equal, (he wanted it to say created for equality, meaning not that we are all equal since that is absurd, some are taller, some are shorter etc. but that we are created to have equal justice.) He wanted slightly different wording. Yet in the world we live in, the concept of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is where we get off track. Early on the concept of rights related to life, liberty and property. But the most famous version came from Thomas Jefferson and stated these rights as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness however is tricky. For John Adams and his generation that meant some form of public happiness such as participating in the management public affairs of men and women. (No one would ever mistake public office as something that brings happiness now, just watch political ads on television.) The question of happiness can only be answered in relationship to another larger question, What is the chief end of man? But since our world denies any purpose, our scientific world denies any teleology, any discussion of final causes, any discussion of divine intent, then happiness is left to the autonomous individual to define. So we each not only have a right to pursue happiness but to define it anyway we want. That is a huge mistake! In the Medieval world people actually believed that final happiness lay on the other side of death. But since the methods of modern science provide no grounds for belief that there is anything beyond death, then all of our human happiness must be achieved in the few years we have in this life before death ends it all. The quest for happiness becomes that much more hectic, more fraught with anxiety than it was to people of the Middle Ages.

No wonder we are profoundly unhappy! We are trying so hard to find and keep our best days our greatest days before us. But we cannot. They slip away, as the intro on the daytime drama says ” Like sands through the hourglass so are the days of our lives.” (I watch All My Children with T, so I can’t name any characters from the show. Eric? Scott? Sarah? can one of you help us out with the current plotline?) Seriously, we cannot stop time, and to find ultimate happiness in this life leads to a frenetic scramble only to have it pass us by. As J M Barrie said “You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.” We are rooted in time, and the infinite hole in our hearts cannot be filled by something finite. Only the infinite God can satisfy. So enjoy the great days you get along the way, treasure them as they never stay. But remember that there is one hope, and One Lord who calls to us. He is the one who can slake our thirst. Remember the odd interchange with Jesus and a woman at the well. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Not only will we no longer be thirsty, but when we find our purpose in him, we become a wellspring for others. Wow. What a great day that would be. Probably one of your greatest!

Here’s to finding that life!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Christian Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.