5 a.m. hit earlier than normal this morning. My weekends would look like purgatory to a lot of people. I seldomly attend weekend parties, Friday night usually means late night study hall (none of my friends have taken me up on a Friday night math study party!). Saturday doesn't mean sleep in, it means get up at four or five in the morning and study more, work for ten hours, then come home and study more if I'm not dead yet. Sunday? Same sort of routine, although church gets thrown in the mix.
That is what weekends have looked like for...a long time. In other words, having a weekend is about as far out of my grasp at this point as a vacation to Hawaii. If I had a weekend, I probably would not even know what to do with it.
Early today, while marveling at the morning with a freshly made cup of coffee and a cracked open textbook, I wonder what I do all this for. What's the point? Why am I here? Why do I do this week after week?
It sometimes seems like people often spend their lives just to get to the next level. The next school. The next degree. The next job. The next promotion. The next relationship. The next house. The next child.
We don't think about why we do what we do. We just do.
This may loose me brownie points, but the idea of one day making a lot of money really has no appeal to me at all. I once heard my small cousin say, "I think I'm going to graduate from college just so I can get me a nice car one day." I have never really understood that mindset, partly because I've never cared what car I drive, but also because I'm afraid. I'm afraid of my life becoming nothing. I'm afraid of being nothing.
I just can't imagine laying on my death bed wondering what I did with my life and saying, "oh, well, I don't know what I did with my life, but at least I have a title to a nice car." I couldn't imagine laying on my deathbed saying I got a college degree, got married or had kids just because that was everyone else's standard of a "good life". Can't we ever do anything simply because it's the right thing to do?
I have a friend who tries to get in on the lottery every week, and one day I asked her what she would do if she won all the money. "Easy," she said, "I'd make a trip to the car lot and get a nice fat title to a new car." Strangely, I would hate winning the lottery. If I ever become wealthy, I would like to achieve my wealth through making the world a better place and because I earned it through my own labor, not because I randomly picked up a lucky ticket. Sounds like a pathetic life to me.
The same theory applies to relationships. A Christian girl I once knew told me, "I really want to pray that the Lord's kingdom would come, but I don't want him to come before I'm married!" That is the point of some girls lives; just to play nice, get married, and have a baby. I couldn't imagine living only for that.
Relationships have never been the ultimate point for me. Because I know when I stand before God about how I used my gifts, "I never found my other half" will not be an adequate excuse. We're called to live for today, to make decisions on what we have in our hands, and to milk life for all its worth even if no one ever comes along beside us.
But somewhere in our cosmic grasp to find something more - something higher - we find a constant emptiness. New cars depreciate. The stock market crashes. Power crumbles. Jobs end. Marriages fail. People die. Physical appearance fades. Everything we chase after seems to lead us to dead ends.
Our problem isn't that we have nice lives. Our problem is that our "nice life" has now become the "ultimate life". Good things are no longer simply good things, they are ultimate things, they are the only things. Tragedy strikes when the good things become the ultimate things.
Apparently I wasn't the only person at work thinking along these lines today. My dear co-worker was talking about how she bought an iPhone for her thirteen year old son. Later in the day she went up into his room and found her teenage son bawling over his iPhone.
"What is wrong?" She asked.
"Mom! I hate this new phone, it sucks, and the sound quality is horrible. This is the worst thing ever."
Rightly so, my co-worker was pissed. She told her son that children were starving in Africa, and he should be thankful he actually had parents willing to buy him a new iPhone. She looked at me, almost crying, and said, "I realized that by trying to give my son everything he ever wanted, I completely ruined him. I'm an awful mom."
She realized something important. No matter how much you work and bend over backwards to give your children everything, it will all be for nothing unless you build their character.
If you are not actively building your character, your life is a waste.
Don't waste your life because you were too busy being entertained.
Don't waste your life because you didn't dare to see too far past today.
Don't waste your life because you kept going in circles and never stopped to ask why.
I don't want to just exist. I want to live. And maybe Socrates was right: maybe only the examined life is the one worth living.
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