I appreciate my life as meaningful (Part 2)

Remember how we started the previous chapter? For a Christian, life is not a game of chance. Instead, life presents us with choices and challenges, while at the same time God somehow—mysteriously—is in control. And unlike fate, God is not neutral. I don't mean that he prefers one person over the other. No, he is for you and for me and for the person next to us. Whether he presents challenges to us or allows those to happen, anything that does happen bears the possibility for us to learn and to grow. 

We'll talk more about those challenges when I write about suffering later, but for now here's what I'd like to convey: The life I live as a Christian is not always easy, but it's designed for me to grow into someone more like the only one I really want to resemble: Jesus.

I already talked about the Bible as the book that contains a story in which Christians will find themselves—possibly anywhere, but most certainly in the person of Jesus Christ. Another open book, one that is even more personal, is our own individual lives. Christians believe that God communicates personally through everything. This means that the life of a person who believes in God becomes the empty pages that God fills through communication with the person associated with that life. 

I realize that there are at least two foreign concepts here for non-Christians. First, the inelegant "person associated with that life." As clunky as this wording might be, Christians do indeed see a difference between their lives and their selves. Yes, we live those lives, but we also believe that these very short lives are really only a blip within our eternal life. Our current lives are only a preamble. There is a very clear difference between my life and me. Clearly, this doesn't mean that I am not responsible for my actions. I am still challenged to live my life filled with love and compassion for people around me. But there is an overwhelming sense that my physical self is very temporary, and the space I inhabit is like a mist—real, but fleeting.

The other curious part of the description above is those empty pages in a book. Aren't those pages anything but empty? Didn't my family and my environment as I grew up, my friends and the experiences as I continued life fill those pages, sometimes more than I wanted? In fact, it seems awfully difficult to find enough space in and between the tracks of my ongoing life to add anything new, or anything that would meaningfully alter the script that seems to determine so much of what I do.

Yes, in many ways we are products of what we have experienced and the decisions we or others made in the past. That's true for everyone, Christian or not. But again, Christians are in that strange position of living our lives but not completely owning those lives. Ultimately, our lives are owned by God, who has the ultimate right of authorship on that book of life. And it's a right he continues to claim and use. For Christians, this means that there is great excitement and anticipation in the way our lives unfold. Yes, we are living those lives and making decisions that steer our lives, but within all that God's script talks and communicates and helps make those very decisions.

A palimpsest was an ancient manuscript memorialized on material that was deemed valuable enough to be used for more than one layer of writing. When the material, often animal skin, was to be reused, the existing layer of writing was scraped off to make room for a new layer. Today these palimpsests are an important source for researching ancient texts because new technology is able to make the various erased layers visible again. With an important difference, this is kind of how Christians see their lives: God writes the underlying layer, which communicates with and informs the upper layer produced by the person and its environment; however, just like with the palimpsest, only the upper layer—the actions and responses of the individual—is visible at first glance.