Becoming

I think if we were all honest in our own assessment of ourselves, we could say there is more time spent "surviving" than there is time spent truly living

    I have found myself lately being more and more serious about things.

Everything from the moment I wake up seems as though the world depends on every decision I make. That's the pressure at least and what it feels like. My thoughts typically follow suit.

I would have to say I actually need to spend hours sometimes “un-serious-ing” myself. Sometimes it is through hobbies and things that bring me life . . . or something as simple as going to a movie or spending time with a close friend where I can just loosen up.

What is driving that?

I wouldn’t dare put the blame on something as noble and taken-out-of context these days as what we would call maturity.

Seriousness isn’t maturity, for I have seen both sides being both neither mature or not.

I wouldn’t call it caring more because what does caring have to do with lacking light-heartedness?

The words burden and weight come to mind when thinking of how serious I have become. I am not even saying it is neither wrong nor right to be one way or another, for it is not my place to say for myself or you, the reader.

But I am realizing more and more my current progression rather than how I used to be years ago.

Is it a bent?

You can’t say it has to do with age because I have noticed both old and young having contrasting characteristics in this matter. I have seen older men as jolly and care-free as a wee lad. I have also seen a younger man seeming to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders without even having high school under there belt yet.

I believe a lot of it has to do with how we are wired, yes I will agree with that. It also has to do with how we are raised, another contributing factor as well.

Let’s go deeper though than just our circumstantial predicaments . . . deeper into why it is, say I, have become more one way than the other.

I felt like God showed me part of it is time.

    Over time we change. That change comes from the journey we are each of us on. What we go through does in fact have an effect and carries with it a mold which changes who we are. The journey can be long. It can be hard and trying. It can leave us in pieces and without hope of anything more. It can wrench loose our hearts from our minds so we live less with heart and more from places of logic, stoically facing the days emotionless and tactful. Not that it is wrong to do so, but simply put it should only be tools in which are applied and not how God intended His creation to live, for He created us with passion and full of boundless fervor for the adventure before us that is life.

Over time though cynicism may creep in, demanding we only listen to its voice more often so as to limit pain from disappointments recurring. 

Basically parts of us begin to survive rather than live.

That is indeed what it comes down to.

I think if we were all honest in our own assessment of ourselves, we could say there is more time spent “surviving” than there is time spent truly “living.”

When I am truly living from my heart, I feel alive inside even though there may not be much going on around me that would warrant excitement. Regardless of what the journey brings, God helps me to live from a deeper place, taking on each moment as if they were waves swelling underneath me as I crash upon the surface of them. Those moments are small yet grand to the soul, for with them carries the perspective of God's redeeming supply of life flowing into us. It is waiting for us to take it . . . to humbly seek Him for it.

    Whether it is a warming conversation about something I am passionate for or simply a good cup of coffee’s aroma floating up into my senses, when I am alive inside in the moments in which I have been given, I can say with utter confidence, I am truly living.

But there are other times where that weightiness of things I cannot help worry about distract me from the moment and I become lost in the thought rapturing my focus into the cynical world against me. There is no life there, only survival. There can't be fullness of life, for when one is trying to survive from moment to moment, there is "no time" for anything aesthetic and grand. The only thing we do have time for is what is of an obligatory nature and what can be tossed to the side. The problem of, as the saying goes, expecting the worst and hoping for the best will only get you first in line at a Starbucks and that's about it. 

    I was just reading an article that mentioned how we can see God in His creation.

Oh how much He loves that which He created.

“Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?”

-Mathew 6:26-27

I think we get that part, that God loves His creation. I think sometimes, no, many times we forget that we are His absolute treasured creation.

How much more would He do for us?

Yet we worry, we strive, and we manipulate our lives to the point where we abandon living from our hearts to take on more “practical” approaches to facing each day as we learn to survive rather than to truly live.

You want to talk about practical?

Reinhold Messner made the first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental Oxygen. He described some of his experience as being so extremely exhausted he no longer had feelings or emotions. He no longer had anxiety or fear or even despair. He said he felt as though he was sort of floating in the fog around him at the mountain's top with nothing but his will and self-awareness as his being. 

It kind of sounds like how most of us live, honestly.

We push and push and push until we have nothing left in our souls but numbness towards ourselves and the daily-grind before us.

Here is the only difference . . . Reinhold Messner was living from his heart, and that made all the difference for answering the question of “Why?” he did it. That wasn't practical what he did. He volunteered himself to allow his body to go through more physical and psychological agony than most of us would ever be willing to go through, yet he did it not as a stance to be "practical" or to survive. If he wanted to survive, he could have stayed in the comforts of his home town enjoying being first in line at a local cafe. No, he chose to live and frankly in my opinion, he truly lived.

I look back now on the younger man I once was to now, still a young man, and I am left with a question that haunts me almost daily.

Who am I becoming?

Am I going to wait until I get to an old age to realize like so many men do what life is actually about?

Are you?

Have we compartmentalized how we view ourselves because of things we have deemed too impossible to even take on one small step towards?

Have we set aside passions in our hearts because they don’t make us money?

    Need I reiterate the starkly clear message God so desperately wants to convey to our sometimes stubborn thick heads . . . that which Jesus Himself said . . . 

“You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money. That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life . . .”

What is in your heart that you have played the role of God in by dismissing it as something that won’t get you to where you think you want to be?

Dismissing those things in your heart is surviving. It is not living.

    You dismiss things when surviving like a kitchen table and wooden chairs because you don’t have the space for them if you get stranded in the Mohave desert and can only afford to carry a few wisely chosen items.

But Jesus wasn’t talking about our lives here with Him as surviving. In fact, He is communicating the opposite, that if He takes care of the birds every day who don't manage to do enough for themselves, how much more would He take care of us?

That is quite literally the opposite of survival. It sounds more like sitting down to eat at a dinner table fully lavished in succulent delicacies provided by a Father who loves us more than we could ever imagine or comprehend.

So, who are you becoming?

After summiting and having finally come back off the mighty mountain half-dead, he was asked the question of why he did it. This was his response . . .

“I didn’t go up there to die . . . I went up there to live.”

-Reinhold Messner