Life: Its Disappointments and Questions

Life folds our dreams into faded roses, spoiled milk, dear-Johns, a piercing “no” to our deepest hopes.

We come as conquerors. We crawl, then walk, run, and even climb, skip, and jump.

  We put words together, then sentences, sonnets, and songs. We write love letters, resumes, condolences, and then someone writes our obituary.

  We seek love and find bruises and abandonment.

Neon, but we get headaches.

Stars, but they are beyond reach.

 Eyes dim, eyeglasses, contacts, implants sustain until they eventually close.

           Mouths, full of teeth, jokes, and words of love fall quiet.

           Sleek bodies bulge with beauty, appeal, and sex wrinkle, fade, exhaust, decay, and silently slip away unnoticed.

          Resist! Exercise, beautify, face-lift, weight-lift, self-help, meditate, but the dust claims all.

We come as conquerors but leave as the conquered.

Is there nothing else? Nothing to give shape to our meaningless life?

Can death be tamed by a lesson? An explanation? A philosophy? A stiff-upper-lip?

Is there a song of hope for the tearful? Is there an answer to death? Is there comfort in oblivion? Or in a universal consciousness, which has no knowledge of me?

Can despair give birth to laughter? Can death be rebuked?

You may not have the answer, but do not kill the question!

A Great Sport: Stumping Christians

Emergent Church guru, Tony Jones, is trying to collect questions that “haunt” Christianity. He gladly solicits them from even atheists. I think that he is using these difficult questions to impugn the Christian faith as he has done so often in the past. Here’s his latest question:

• If I were to accept Jesus and ask for salvation, how could I ever find happiness in the afterlife knowing that most of my family was sent to hell for eternity? If they somehow have a chance to get into heaven despite their clear disbelief, why should I bother with Christianity, since I will have that same chance of redemption?

Admittedly, I do not have the answer, but here’s my response to Tony:

Trust me on this – a thinking Christian need not be “haunted” by these questions. We are willing to accept the fact that as heaven is above earth, so are God’s ways above ours. We don’t expect to have all the answers, but we can know enough about our God to trust Him.

I think that the hidden message here is that the more questions we can’t answer, the more flimsy our faith appears. However, those who come to this conclusion exercise a double-standard.

The world of Science is also very mysterious. We can’t even define the basics like space, time, matter and light. These things are mind-boggling. However, we don’t throw out science because of these imponderables. If the physical world – the creation – is beyond understanding, why then should we expect to be able to put God – the Creator – into a neat theological box? (This is not to admit that either in science or theology we are entirely ignorant. This is merely a recognition that we are very limited.)

If science isn’t “haunted” by its imponderables, why then should Christians be “haunted?”