The Big Three Oh

I am now 30 years old.

I still don't really feel like I know what I'm doing and haven't learned how to shut off my brain and just live in the moment. That makes strange distinction, implying one is either smart and self-aware OR one is dumb and just gives in to the current emotions, desires and impulses and makes decisions in the moment. That's not exactly what I meant.

I realize "30 is the new 20", which, honestly, doesn't do much for the sake of easing the mixed emotions of turning thirty. Our culture is drastically different from 2o or 30 years ago. With the internet, cell phones, video games, etc. our cultural landscape is and has shifted. Most of us are in a perpetual state of "arrested development" (Hey, that's the name of a show!) We are raised by our families and schools and churches to progress through the hoops of ever increasing levels and accomplishments. First day of school. Graduating middle school. Getting a driver's license. Graduating high school. Graduating college. Once you do that, get a job that pays your bills... and then? If you choose (or it works out in your favor that way), you can get married and have kids and become a bystander on their journey through those rites of passage... vicious circle.

What do you do once you've graduated from college and you have a job that pays the bills? The American Dream says get all you can to live comfortably and safely. Buy more stuff. That's just garbage. It doesn't make anyone happy, it just dulls the pain of not having a freakin' clue about what makes life worth living and how to find deep lasting satisfaction. But, if you can't put your finger on how to live, it's so easy to slide back into being comfortable. Settle for a nice, quiet life. Be content with that. Eat, drink and be happy.

Is that it? I know the book of Ecclesiastes concludes that about life, especially when you take God out of the picture. But that doesn't seem consistent with the whole of the Bible... if it that's simple... God wasted a whole hell of a lot of His and our time in preserving all these other things in the Bible... Christianity is obviously more than just eat, drink and be happy. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have had to come to earth and die on the cross, etc. That just wouldn't have been necessary...

Is it "telling people about Jesus"? Getting people "saved"? There's something so flat to that, in my experience. The church I grew up in lacked so much in terms of understanding the gospel in a holistic sense. They had no idea how to train disciples of Christ, they just knew how to make converts. I think this has been true of a lot of churches in America. That's not a huge stone that I'm throwing, because I know there's a lot of good intentions behind that. But just telling people that they are sinful and Jesus died to save them... seems shallow and irrelevant. Because, so if they say a prayer and believe what you scare them with, what then? You've now just created a Christian who is scared of hell and the whole of Christianity to them has been introduced to them as fire-insurance from hell that has NOTHING to say about regular day-to-day life. There's nothing loving... well, there's something loving in that, maybe, but it's so incomplete and insufficient at explaining the good news that Jesus Christ supposedly is...

All this is coming around to say this:

The culture around me gives an explanation for how to find life, the American Dream. Be selfish, greedy if necessary, to amass as much stuff as you can to live comfortably and safely and free from any kind of suffering.

The version of Christianity I've experienced for most of my life taught me that life is found in serving God by trying to get people saved, by telling them they are bound for hell unless they pray to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

These two avenues for finding life are pathetically lacking. Jesus said, love God and love your neighbor as yourself. That seems a little more simple, yet powerful, and difficult to do. But it's a start... but that really just deals with the day to day living...

How do I understand where I am today? As a 30 year-old, what do I do with this desire for a tangible purpose? Try to silence it? That doesn't seem wise, responsible or plausible.

So, I guess that's what I'm questioning right now. What's the most important thing for me to be? To learn? To strive for? To do? I feel like I'm in a weird transition season of life, but transitioning to what?

I've read things by John Piper and others, who quote the Westminster Catechism, that says something like, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

But what does that look like? How do we enjoy a God we don't see, taste, hear, touch or smell? How do we glorify a God that we barely understand or experience, who seems unkind or passive or cruel or altogether absent to so many?

These are just some of my questions at the beginning of my 4th decade on this ball of dirt spinning its way through the cosmos. Life is so short... What makes it count for something?