Dead at 40, Buried at 70 Something.
A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of walking the Camino De Santiago (something I would highly recommend to do at least once in your life)!
As five of us walked through the wine country of northern Spain, a thousand year-old bridge, over 2000-year-old roads, and what seemed to be a place lost in time, we talked. One of the men on our small pilgrimage shared a conversation he had recently had with a young 20 something year old. He asked this young man who was courting his daughter, “Are you a Christian?”. The young man replied, “No, I tried the whole Church thing, and it just wasn’t for me”. I loved my friend’s response, “Oh, then you must have just met the Sunday morning God that most of the western Church knows. You certainly did not meet my wild Jesus, because if you did, you would have never walked away!”
For most of us, life is pretty mundane, isn’t it? We do what we have to do to pay our bills, work hard, love our families. Maybe we go to Church, and “do the right thing”. We have some highlights here and there, we take our yearly vacation, maybe we go on a mission trip or see another country, but deep down it seems something is missing. Something is gnawing us deep inside which we simply cannot figure out. As time goes by, we end up doing mostly the same thing every day: eating at the same restaurants and ordering the same meal, going to the same gas station, the same supermarket, taco Tuesdays; we may break it up a bit with having friends over a few times a year, and of course, sitting in the same section at Church week after week. We sit, we wonder, we dream, and we wait.
Maybe for you it’s not that way at all. Maybe you enjoy your work, the cubical within which you create. You find joy and satisfaction in your daily routine and changing the world within which you live. If that is you, congratulations: you are in the 2% who are actually content and living fully alive!
I had a man once tell me, “If you are not building something or creating something, if you are not leading and changing the world around you, your wife cannot respect you. She cannot follow a man that is not bringing ‘life’ to something or someone.”
That statement changed me. It made me ask myself, “Where are you bringing “life”? Are you creating, leading, and changing the people and places around you? Are you serving the Sunday “Church” or are you serving my ‘Wild Jesus’?”.
Something Andrew Shearman at G42 taught us many years ago is: as men we insert ourselves into things and create life! When you show up, does the atmosphere change and become life, do you make everywhere you go look like the Garden of Eden? When Adam was kicked out of the Garden, God gave him a command, “Go and make the earth look like this.” As men we create life; we make everything we touch – our brides
, our children, the people and places around us— look like the Garden. We bring life or we bring nothing at all.
Are you dead and just going through the motions until your body breaks down and we
bury you? Or are you fully-alive, bringing life, bringing the Garden to everyone you know and every place you go?
As Sid the Sloth says in the movie Ice Age, “I choose life!”
