Survival Style

Jesus had a par­tic­u­lar style of sur­vival: He focused on God, him­self, and peo­ple with uncon­di­tional love. He worked hard as a car­pen­ter. He took his per­sonal spir­i­tual life seri­ously. He trusted God and the cre­ation for his daily food. He did all he could for oth­ers — given his human lim­i­ta­tions. When he died, he did not even have his own clothes. They had been dis­trib­uted to oth­ers through a game of chance.

His sur­vival style does not look like what most of us do. We “sock it away” in invest­ments (as we should as respon­si­ble stew­ards). We give to noble char­i­ties. The taxes get a chunk of it. We may or may not be able to depend on help from the gov­ern­ment when we get older. All in all, we real­ize that the com­mon meth­ods of sur­vival are entirely too mate­r­ial. We con­fuse sur­vival with pay­ing the bills. Jesus had a much longer term con­cept of sur­vival. His style focused on res­ur­rec­tion from the dead.

That is where we miss the mark. If we focused on eter­nal life with all of the ener­gies of this pass­ing phys­i­cal life, our world would look very dif­fer­ent. As it is, most peo­ple give a token nod to God once in a while — maybe even a few nick­els and dimes worth of ener­gies toward the con­cept of eter­nity, but for the most part, human­ity is focused on the here and now. Their hopes for the next life are lit­tle more than air castles.

I find myself falling into the com­mon pat­terns with great reg­u­lar­ity. I am more con­cerned with what peo­ple think of me than what God thinks of me. I am too will­ing to set­tle for sixty or sev­enty years of a com­fort­able life, rather than take the risks for an eter­nal one. By default, I let things drift along so as not to rock the boat. The prophetic side of me becomes pas­sive. The idea of coast­ing to the end sounds really good these days. “Faith­ful unto death…” is not the phrase I like to chant to myself. My style is get­ting last-century accom­plish­ment cob­webs on it. I am tempted to be con­tent to die the death of a com­fort­able middle-class Amer­i­can, rather than the gave-it-all-he-had Chris­t­ian. My style of sur­vival is a bit short-sighted. Dur­ing the sea­son of Lent, this one gets a remake.