Goodbye

Well, we come to it at last – my final post. I’m very grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to share my thoughts with all of you; your faithfulness in putting up with my erratic posting schedule and repetitive topics is much appreciated. I have plenty more thoughts; I just don’t have the time to write them down and post them regularly. I hope you’ll hear from me at some point in the future in another venue, but for now, it’s time to say goodbye.

Growth and Goodbyes

I started this blog back in 2017. I was 21 years old and a senior at Harvard; I’d done some study abroad, but I’d never had a regular job or really lived on my own. I had a vague idea of big dreams, but I didn’t have a clue what to do about it. Now I’m sitting in my house in Japan a little over four years later, with a master’s degree and two navy tours under my belt, pondering how little I knew then.

Well, it’s not exactly that I knew so little. I knew a lot, but I didn’t understand the implications of that knowledge. I knew about a lot of truths, but I didn’t know them in the experiential sense. It took time for them to work their way through my life. I look back on the last four years and love them. There have been a lot of hard lessons, but they’ve made me that much stronger. The tears make the smiles sweeter.

It’s always hard for me to tell how much I’ve grown. I never notice it in the moment; it always feels like I’m just stumbling blindly along, finding my rhythm for a few steps only to trip and go teetering from one side to the other all over again. I still make dozens of mistakes every day – things I wish I’d done, or hadn’t said, or had thought of earlier. But looking back, I can see how much I’ve grown – and I know I’ll continue to grow.

New Horizons

I was talking to my parents earlier today about the Japanese restaurant I wandered into this weekend. “I’m not actually sure what it was I ate,” I told them. “I think it was raw fish – that’s what the menu said – but whatever it was, it was good!”

“You’ve come a long way, my dear.” was my mother’s comment. And I have. The me that was too shy to talk to strangers, who didn’t like change or foreignness, who stuck close to home and didn’t know how to socialize, is gone. I’m still an introvert, but I can find my way all over the world by myself and enjoy it. I can deal with the problems, both professional and personal, that arise in a normal workplace. The things that used to overwhelm me, drive me to tears, and keep me up at night don’t bother me anymore. My horizons have grown.

Making a Difference

I’ve been slowly making my way through War and Peace recently; it’s been a long time since I read novels regularly, and I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Tolstoy argues that all of history is predestined: everything is the result of a million chances and the conflicting wills and choices of millions of people, and in the midst of that, no one can make a definitive difference, and no plan, no matter how brilliant, will work as intended. The more a person thinks he’s making a difference, the more he is the slave of circumstances.

Tolstoy has a point. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. No one person or decision can shape the world alone. War – or business, or nonprofits, or life in general – isn’t a group of brilliant leaders planning elaborate strategies, where the best plan wins. It’s a mess of freak chances, lucky breaks, and general confusion, where no one’s ever perfectly clear on what’s happening and nothing goes as intended.

I’ve had to learn this over and over in the past four years. During my last year of college, I made plan after elaborate plan of what I wanted my life to look like in the future, and exactly zero of those plans turned out the way I thought they would. I’ve started dozens of projects that went nowhere, pictured dozens of outcomes that never came off, and scrapped idea after idea after idea that turned out not to account for reality. But after all that, I’ve come to a different conclusion than Tolstoy, who thinks we should forget about grand aims and focus on the simple things, and perhaps attain an almost Buddhist detachment from all mortal concerns. In fact, I’ve come to about the opposite conclusion.

Concentrated Power of Will

It is true (fortunately) that one decision will not set the rest of your life in stone. But that does not mean individual will is trivial. On the contrary, will – concentrated desire carried through millions of minute decisions over time – is essential to success. Things will certainly not go as planned. A thousand course-corrections will be made, but that’s okay. It is not the course that matters; it is the destination. Success is not about having a perfect plan; it’s about being willing and able to adapt without losing sight of the endgame.

This is not to say that there aren’t crucial crossroads in individual lives and in history. If Eve hadn’t eaten the apple, if Abraham hadn’t left Ur, if Moses hadn’t pleaded for the Israelites, if Alexander hadn’t left Macedonia, if Caesar hadn’t crossed the Rubicon, if Columbus hadn’t crossed the Atlantic, if Perry hadn’t sailed into Japan, if Disney hadn’t started an animation company, if Rommel had succeeded in killing Hitler, if Kennedy hadn’t diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis – what would the world now look like? God’s aims would still have been accomplished, Tolstoy tells us. But they would have been accomplished in a very different world than the one we now occupy.

But here’s the thing – these weren’t one-off events. If you look at Abraham, or Moses, or Alexander, or Caesar, or Disney, or Kennedy, you will find that the decisions they made were in keeping with the whole pattern of their life. They didn’t wake up one day and change the world; rather, they spent every hour of every day making decisions – sometimes right, sometimes wrong – in accordance with their goals, and eventually the watershed came. They didn’t pop into history as men of legend; they were ordinary human beings who had the flexibility and the grit to adapt to events and accomplish their aims.

Providence and Perseverence

As I was talking to my parents this morning, Joseph’s story in Genesis came up. My father mentioned something I hadn’t thought of before: that Joseph was qualified to run Egypt because he had experience at court and in management from running Potiphar’s household – and he was qualified to run Potiphar’s household because he’d had experience managing his father’s extensive holdings. Joseph didn’t get to be in charge of Egypt out of the blue just because he ‘was spiritual’ and ‘had faith.’ He was able to take charge of the situation because – whether he knew it or not – he’d been trained for it his whole life.

Call it what you like – providence, fate, or destiny – this is how it works. It doesn’t pop out of the blue if you are just ‘spiritual enough’. It works when you work, through the ordinary course of life. If you make a habit of doing difficult things, being compassionate to others, broadening your perspective, building your skillset, and taking part in purposes larger than yourself, you won’t have to wait for a wizard to knock at your door and ask if you want to share in an adventure. You will wake up and realize you’re already in an adventure, because that is the pattern of life you have created for yourself. And you will find your destiny.

God didn’t give us Easter in order to create a new, spiritual life to be lived alongside the ordinary one, or to let us into a heaven separate from the messed up state of the earth. He came to redeem the ordinary, to redeem every moment and every object on the earth. I am making all things new – new, the way newly fallen snow, or a particularly beautiful morning, or a glad heart, can make ordinary or even ugly things suddenly unfamiliar and breathtaking, the way masses of flowers come bursting out of a tree you thought was dead. That is redemption; that is what God is doing to the whole universe. He did not come to take us out of the world; he came to remake the world we have, just as he longs to remake every one of us.

The Wrath of God

But to respect the true scope of the miracle of Easter, we must first respect the wrath of God.

Recently I watched The Equalizer 2. At the finale of the film, the protagonist finds the villain, brutally kills him, and leaves. It’s that simple. There is no slugfest, no fancy quips, no emotional qualms. There is rage, but it is a calm rage. There is brutality, but it is an efficient brutality, no different from slicing carrots or breaking up twigs for the fire. There is no huffing and puffing, no roar, only a set face and pitiless eyes. To such just wrath, there is no appeal. There is only the death that the villain has earned.

It terrified me because I know that I’m not perfect, that I’ve done things that deserved punishment and got away with them, that if someone judged me, I also would have no appeal. Chesterton said there was something chilling in the thought of a statue of Christ in wrath; he was right. those eyes are what I picture when I think of the wrath of God, the wrath that is revealed from heaven against men.

This is the wrath that was poured out on Christ. Justice had to be satisfied; there was no ignoring it, no minimizing it. There was no appeal, no choice. It demanded retribution; it demanded blood. And blood was given.* There was no hesitation, no wavering, no weakness, no pulling of punches on the cross. There was only justice – stern, unrelenting, inexorable, final justice. The execution was carried out, and nothing could stop it.

But nothing could stop the resurrection, either.

The Love of God

God’s love is every inch as powerful as his wrath. If once you accept it, it is unhesitating and unrelenting. You cannot fall out of God’s love; you cannot be snatched from his hand, even by yourself. You cannot do anything so bad, Christ’s death on the cross doesn’t cover it. You are saved, and that is final. There is no appeal. A new life has begun in you, a life so powerful, even physical death cannot stop it, even the death of God couldn’t stop it. It is a love that will transform you, no matter how long it takes or how much it hurts or how many times you mess it up. There is no escaping. You are his.

This is the God I worship: at once terrifying and tender, humiliated and magnificent. Tolstoy can keep his silent, gloomy, inscrutable deity. My God made ducklings and baby pandas and lightning, invented laughter and dancing and sex. He made the sky deep blue and trees dozens of shades of green, and that still wasn’t enough color, so he made flowers and fruits and sunsets and sea slugs. The world is not indifferent or meaningless; it is bursting with life and joy, even if our sin keeps us from seeing it (the same way a head cold keeps us from smelling the most fragrant of roses).

This post length is becoming unmanageable; I have to say goodbye. But if you take nothing else from the posts on this site, know that we live in a world of wonder governed by a God of love. Is life always sunshine and roses? Of course not – adventures never are. But like any good adventure, this life – and this world – are worth it if we hang on to the end.

*If you want to (very carefully) consider it another way, God adopted us and committed seppuku to wipe the shame of our sin out of the family line.