Category Archives: life purpose

The Best Years

When I was in high school, many adults told me I ought to really enjoy those years because they were “the best years of [my] life.”

Well, for me, high school itself was not, overall, such a great time, and having a bunch of grownups assert that it would turn out to be so was not encouraging at all. From where I am now, I feel sorry for a lot of those adults, because if that was their experience, they must have had pretty miserable adult lives.

Very often, we’ve adopted the idea that some certain time comprises the “best years of life.”  Consider the people who postpone marriage and family because they believe that their 20’s are “the best years of life” and they want to be “free” to travel/build a career/be self-indulgent/whatever.  Some of them will regret later that they did not make different choices (ask any therapist, priest, minister or rabbi).

On the other hand, some of us have our lives unfold in a different order: responsibility precedes higher education, and career-building comes largely after active-duty parenting. What, in the long haul, did I “miss out” on? Not a thing, and this was clear all along the way because I refused to take the bait on some certain time being “the best years” as if it were a prize category.

How about framing things up this way: each period of life is the “best” for what it is meant to be. As it says in Ecclesiastes, 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in His time.”  And in its time, too.  There are some things that our 20s tend to be best for; and for some things, our 40s, 50s, 60s.  Yes, biologically, the 20s are peak time for having babies, and yes, forms of learning that require sheer memorization are best pursued prior to the 40s.  High-level analysis and wisdom, on the other hand, peak later than memorization and keep rolling, usually long after we start fumbling for the reading glasses we put down someplace and then find on our head.

There are different challenges, joys, and heartaches all along the way. Fortunately, our priorities change, or ought to. For God’s sake, who wants to be over 50 and as terrified of other people’s opinions as the typical 15-year-old? 

Are you tempted to feel discouraged? Does it feel as if all doors are shut because some events, some struggles, or perhaps your own regrettable choices, have meant you have lost a chance at the “best years”? Please reconsider. Make a different set of choices or just one different choice today. Then, perhaps, unexpectedly “best” years start today. You probably won’t be able to tell right away. Usually, we only see this when there’s enough distance to look back at today, tomorrow and the next day.

Why am I still here?

“Why am I still here?”

I hear that a lot. Perhaps you do, too.  The veteran who survived a firefight that took his friends; the person who woke up in the hospital to find they were the only survivor of a car crash that took their family; a survivor of a natural disaster that took many lives.  Many adults, perhaps most, have had such an existential episode. I’ve been in car accidents that could have killed me; survived acts of violence that could just as easily have tipped over into lethality, lived through serious illness. None of those are particularly unusual, and only mentioned to underscore the point.

“What do I live for now? What ought I be doing?”

That’s a tough one, yet it is the question every believer is tasked with as the subtext of life every day.  There is some chatter among the media that presuming that one’s survival is in God’s hands is some sort of unusual perspective. It is not my intention to speculate on any particular person’s interpretation of what that means. For those who find it perplexing, I hope to offer at least this Christian’s perspective. God never wants evil; it takes our free will for that to happen. Many of us wrestle with trying to figure out why God allows bad things to happen. Allowing something is not the same as wanting something, that’s for sure; every parent has to learn that lesson, fairly early on.

You may want your toddler to go to sleep. You may want that very, very, very eyes-burning-with-exhaustion much. But you have to allow the reality that the toddler will keep on singing songs, or whining, or coming out to complain. (If you do anything to “make” a child sleep, whatever adult is aware of it is required to report that to child protective services). C.S. Lewis does a much better job of explaining this particular point.  God, of course, chooses to allow or not. I’m not going to understand why because I am not God. God creates everything and I can do not a thing, even catch a breath, unless God wills it.

Our job is to figure out what God wants from us in each emerging situation, whether the situation itself was His will or not. For believers, every breath is a gift; there is no guarantee of another. Pondering what we are to do with these circumstances and assuming God has a preference in terms of our choice of action is not a big stretch.

So, for a Christian, God did not want Corey Comperatore to die in gunfire, protecting his family. It was not God’s will for the gunman to shoot. Mr. Comperatore clearly discerned his purpose was to protect at all costs. He had, apparently, discerned this over and over until his reflex towards self-sacrifice looked “automatic.” That seems to be a sign that his formation into the nature of Jesus Christ, the nature of complete self-giving, was something he had truly embraced.

And now, everyone left behind must discern what God asks of them in this new, tragic circumstance. Over the course of years and months, his family will each have to discern how to restructure life and find a different path forward. Friends and neighbors will need to discern, ongoing, how to provide friendship and support when the months pass and the spotlight of media attention fades.

The question doesn’t necessitate a tragedy, such as an accident, tornado or an attempted assassination. It is a perennial question: every person mourning infertility, every widow, widower, and bereaved parent.  Adolescents are supposed to wrestle with it; the elderly are, too. And all along the way, it is the question every thinking person ponders when transitioning to a new stage of life. We ask it at those times, too, that are both joyful and sad; a child grows up and successfully leaves the nest: mission accomplished; but what is my purpose now? Retirement comes; well, then what? What is your purpose now, beyond a vague sense of perpetual recess?

Being Christian means striving to be conformed to the nature of Jesus Christ. That means seeking not just to avoid being “bad” but attempting to do God’s will in every situation.  Is it “bad” to spend an entire lazy weekend afternoon with a pot of tea, a good book and a handful of chocolate? Especially on the Sabbath? No, lemon ginger tea and Lady Gregory’s book of Irish folklore, edited by W.B. Yeats, don’t make the list of “do-nots,” but the entire afternoon? When a friend needs a caring ear or a letter? When a nagging thought keeps intruding with that starts with, “I really need to reach out to…” maybe the “not a bad thing” needs to step aside and yield to the “better thing,” a “because” for the moment.

And, when you’re wrestling with the big questions of life, the little “becauses” become a path through the dark places.