Insufficient
I lie in bed, curled tightly inward. I can almost feel my organs working. They are unimaginably complex and I’m surprised they function at all. When will something go wrong? My body is always threatening to quit, and one day it will.
I am almost paralyzed by the fragility of life. Every time I get in a car, I wonder if it’ll be the last. I could die at any moment and if not from a car accident, than from an aneurysm, heart failure, murder. Cancer is no respecter of age. The surprising thing is not when death strikes, but how often it doesn’t. I don’t know how much time is left on the clock, but it’s less than I’ve ever had.
Even if it’s not death lurking behind the next corner, it will be something unpleasant. I’ll lose my job. The stiffness in my fingers will devolve into arthritis. My hair will recede, my clothes will wear out, I’ll run out of money. Everything I have is temporary and who’s to say when it will be taken away?
Even if the future is better than I expect, there are limitations in the present I can not overcome. I don’t have enough money to do all the things I want to do. My brain can’t solve all the problems I give it to work on. There are conversations I can’t keep up with and books I can’t understand. I’m a product of my environment, so influenced by my time and place in history my upbringing and genetics, that finding any truly objective solidity seems impossible. Words fail me. Time keeps ticking as I learn the wrong lessons from the past and misread the future. I continually gain knowledge, but always with less and less time to use it. So much of the time I do have is robbed by sleep, food prep, emails, and other maintenance tasks, that precious little is left over for the things I think are actually worthwhile – art, philosophy, adventure, family, and friends.
My heart-rate is climbing and my breathing becomes more rapid. I don’t know how I am able to know or do anything. I don’t even know why I’m still alive – it all seems so improbable. When will my luck run out and my vulnerabilities swallow me whole? The suspense (along with everything else) is killing me.
For all of that, I’m far more privileged than most. I could have been born into a refugee camp, a war-torn African desert, or Haitian sugar cane village. No education, no money, minimal food. If I was born anytime before 1900, my life expectancy would not have exceeded forty years. My income is much larger than the global average, and my standard of living far higher. I am healthy and I have the love of family and friends.
I feel hemmed in by my limitations, but even accounting for them, I have more freedom and opportunity than most people have had. I feel guilty to be so blessed and to have done so little with it.
But what can I do? Every generation is given the Sisyphean task of reinventing the wheel, while being deprived of resources and beset by every challenge imaginable. We overcome our own neuroses and false narratives only to be taken out by a war, a tornado, or someone’s malevolence. The cards are stacked against us. We are plagued by our limitations, and no amount of money or status can save us. Our dreams and plans are constantly invaded by forces beyond our control, threatening our ambitions and our existence. So much effort, confusion, failure, and wasted time. So little progress toward Heaven.
Yet this is intrinsic to the human experience. We were created with these insufficiencies, so in a sense, they are not insufficiencies at all. Whatever purpose we were created for can not be thwarted by the limitations we were created with. We are not self-sustainable immortals, because for whatever reason, we were not meant to be. We have been given everything we need,* which means if we don’t have it, we don’t need it.
In the Parable of the Talents**, the Master gave His servants different amounts of money. To one He gave ten talents, to another five, and to another one. In the end, each servant was judged according to what he did with what he had.
I don’t get to decide how many talents I’ve been given, and I may feel very limited by the number I have. But it doesn’t matter if someone else has ten or someone else has one. The fox’s job is not to be a good eagle, and the peasant’s job is not to be a good king. The only thing I should concern myself with is what I do with what I have. I will do it poorly because incompetence is humanity’s primary characteristic. But as C.S. Lewis wrote, if only the will to walk is really there, God is pleased even with our stumbles.***
Somehow, despite how much I am betrayed by a crumbling body or ambushed by unforeseen dangers, despite the threat of death constantly hanging over me, despite every limitation, God will manage to do what He wants in and through me.
I am just one page of music in a symphony I am unable to comprehend. It all seems so futile, but only if I’m trying to carve out my place in it. If I’m trying to force my piece of music to sound the way I want it to, last as long as possible, and be a crucial part of the symphony as I see it, then I am doomed to frustration and futility. But if I release my control, allow God to do what He wants, and relax into the wonder of getting to be a part of it, I am free. I don’t know my part, let alone its place in the whole; but God does and it will be written and played the way it needs to be – poor tuning and broken notes included. And that is sufficient.
J.
*2 Peter 1:3
**Matthew 25:14-30
***The Screwtape Letters
March 22, 2022