If you keep going the same direction spiritually, where will you end up?
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where the
trajectory of a life is headed. If a
mid-course correction isn’t made, the life that is headed away from a right
relationship with God will just keep getting further and further away.
By his own description, Peter, a retired gentleman and
fellow shopper whom I had a wide ranging dialogue with at the grocery store, was
dealt a pretty good hand of cards spiritually speaking. He grew up in a solid, two-parent churchgoing
family, was taught good morals and values, received a good education and has
been blessed with a solid career as a photographer. Yet as we talked I could see a trajectory to
his life leading further away from God, from Catholicism to eastern philosophy
and from a belief in a Creator to the belief that we are all part of the
universal “god’ and now to a denial that a higher power even exists.
Peter was attracted to the eastern philosophy of Daoism and
kept mentioning the idea of an enlightened “way” to truth, yet he never really did
describe what that might be. Our
conversation covered a lot of ground and flowed freely from one spiritual or
religious topic to another, but another pattern I saw through it all was a consistent
rejection of almost anything related to the God of the Bible. He seemed to have an open mind toward all
alternatives, but an “anything but” attitude toward Christianity.
These constant and consistent rejections against the God of
the Bible are what I believe form the trajectory of his life. In his book “Mere Christianity”, C.S. Lewis
writes about this trajectory and its ultimate consequence: “Every time you make a choice you are turning
the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little
different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your
innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central
thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature
that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else
into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures,
and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy
and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror,
idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is
progressing to the one state of the other.”
According to the Bible, there is one thing that can create a
mid-course correction and stop this trajectory and it is an extremely unpopular
word: “repentance”. An acknowledgement
and turning away from sin, and a turning toward God, saying “yes” to God at
every point of the way rather than “no”.
And not just any god, but the God of the Bible, the God who has sacrificed
His own Son to make the true “way” back to Himself – Jesus Christ.
Peter mentioned that he had just been to a regular meeting
of his book club. My experience has
shown me that people usually surround themselves with like-minded people. I wonder if his book club is the same –
people open to any and all spiritual alternatives, but closed to the Christian
God. I wonder if they would consider
reading the Bible, or at least a Christian book like Lewis’ Mere Christianity,
or if they are just dedicated to keeping each other on the same trajectory. On the surface, we seem to be unconcerned but
deep down, I think we all know where that trajectory leads.
Thanks Peter, for an interesting conversation! It can be seen HERE
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