I had a plan for my life and it was good. I would find a career I love, get married, have children, and own a beautiful, Pinterest-worthy home. My plan included all the right steps I needed to take in order to achieve such a life and it wasn’t rocket science. It was easy: do the right things, gain knowledge, be a good person, a faithful Christian, and then wait for the outpouring of blessings to occur.
Proverbs 21:5 “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
A caveat to this idea about the good life tends to slip many of our minds: that we must also be born into the right environment. And I thought I had been: a stable family, free college tuition, white, middle-class, female. (Though the female part hasn’t always worked out for me.) I had good friends, a good church, and even a car at 16! Everything about my life screamed You can achieve your dreams!
But nothing is as destabilizing to our best laid plans towards a good life as suffering. No matter how much knowledge we’ve gained or how virtuous our character may be, we can’t cheat death, we can’t control other people, and we certainly cannot force the hand of God.
Proverbs 19:21 “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”
The messages I received growing up were more about being a good person according to “Christian standards” and less about inner transformation. As long as I was faithful, God would bless me. If something was going wrong in my life, it was a sign of a lack of faith, not simply life doing what life does. Everything could be solved through prayer and scripture reading. I took that seriously enough that my highest good became the pursuit of Biblical knowledge, thinking that would be the key to achieve my best life now.
Philippians 3:7 “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.”
Paul’s message in Philippians is almost impossible to understand in contemporary Western culture. Our tendency to shine up the Gospel message has us believing our lives will be “better” for it. We aren’t as often told that a life of faith is more about joining in suffering for/with Christ or giving all we have to the poor. Rather, it’s about the same kind of “better life” we hear about from social media influencers and prosperity gospel-dealers instead of the counter-intuitive, countercultural “better life” that Jesus actually promises. In turn, many of us have become the rich young ruler in one way or another.
Mark 10:17-22: As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do so that I may inherit eternal life?” But Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not give false testimony, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to Him, “Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth.” Looking at him, Jesus showed love to him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But he was deeply dismayed by these words, and he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property.
At the height of a ten-year struggle with infertility, I remember telling a friend I don’t want the fruits of the Spirit, I want a baby! In my heart, I did everything I needed to do to gain the blessings of God and now he owed me. My plan for a good life was crumbling before my eyes, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. It felt unfair of God to ask me to give away all that I had gained in order to follow him. Hadn’t I done enough already?! But I didn’t get it. My brain clearly believed in a formula for the good life, but it wasn’t the way of Christ. It was a well-paved path to pursue my own happiness, not the narrow way of suffering that leads to inner transformation. It’s completely unreasonable, this path of Jesus, and yet it is the only way.
When we read passages from scripture like “the narrow gate” and “the only way to the Father” as merely salvific, we miss entirely the life that Jesus is calling us to. Jesus isn’t calling us into a belief that requires certain moral behaviors thereafter but into a totally different way of living in the here and now, even more, into a different way of seeing the good life.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? (Mathew 16:24-26)
Whoever loses their life will find it. That’s a hard sell! Instead, we want to sign up for eternal life in heaven with crowns and palaces, where there is no suffering. We want to sign up for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But the self-emptying love of God invites us into something deeper, a Good that runs to the very core of our humanity connecting us with our Imago Dei souls. This isn’t about sacrificing our happiness for holiness, that’s only another pious and pithy path to morality. Instead, Christ leads to the good life through the practice of giving away. We gain only to give.
If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. (Luke 6:29, 30)
We often use Jesus as our ticket to heaven or our moral WWJD compass, but miss entirely the message of Christ’s life. We have food to give it away, we have clothes to give them away, we have money to give it away. We gain knowledge and privilege but God asks us to take the lowest seat. We are far richer than we acknowledge and it is in keeping what we feel is rightfully ours, that we deceive ourselves into believing this is the good life. Yet, it is in hoarding our lives that we hoard the gospel message. It is in seeking the good life for ourselves only that we keep the good life from our neighbors.
Are we not exhausted in our striving to find the good life?! Do we still have an ache for something more, something deeper? I know the rich young ruler must have or he wouldn’t have sought Jesus out! He could have lived comfortably in his piety but he knew somewhere deep down that wasn’t the point, so he asked the question. And Jesus, who loved him dearly, gave him the most unreasonable, most life-giving answer: leave behind your kingdom for mine. Jesus didn’t give him just another task to do but a way to be. It is a very narrow gate that many of us will not walk through because our arms are too full of what we think is the good life. But the truly good life is lived with arms emptied and stretched wide.
