Are We Really Living While We're Living?

Heart pumping and lungs pulsating is only one definition of life, a very plastic and ambiguous one at that! Many (most?) fail to truly enjoy living. Eugene Peterson in Run with the Horses, quotes the Czech philosopher and martyr Vitezslav Gardovsky (1978), writing in God Is Not Yet Dead that "the terrible threat against life is not death or pain, nor any variation on the disasters that we so obsessively try to protect ourselves against with our social systems and personal stratagems. The terrible threat is 'that we might die earlier than we really do die, before death has become a natural necessity. The real horror lies in just such a premature death, a death after which we go on living for many years.'"

How Do We Fight This?

Peterson says,

We live in a society that tries to diminish us to the level of the antheap so that we scurry mindlessly, getting and consuming. It is essential to take counteraction (emphasis mine). . . The only way that any one of us can live at our best is in a life of radical faith in God. Every one of us needs to be stretched to live at our best, awakened out of dull moral habits, shaken out of petty and trivial busy-work.

An Example in Jeremiah

According to Peterson, what God did in enlisting the prophet Jeremiah, he does with us as well.

I called you to live at your best, to pursue righteousness, to sustain a drive toward excellence. It is easier, I know, to be neurotic. It is easier to be parasitic. It is easier to relax in the embracing arms of the The Average. Easier, but not better. Easier, but not more significant. Easier, but not more fulfilling. I called you to a life of purpose far beyond what you think yourself capable of living and promised you adequate strength to fulfill your destiny.

Don't Quit NOW!

God, as it were, continues with Jeremiah, "Now at the first sign of difficulty you are ready to quit. If you are fatigued by this run-of-the-mill crowd of apathetic mediocrities, what will you do when the real race starts, the race with the swift and determined horses of excellence? What is it you really want, Jeremiah, do you want to shuffle along with this crowd, or run with the horses?"

As a Christian, I hear you Peterson. As a Pastor, I really hear you! When we arrive at the end of the book, we look back over the long prophecy of Jeremiah and have to conclude, "He ran with the horses!" Find the quest, embrace the hope. Shall we not join him?