I am having random thoughts today around the pressure our world puts on us to be successful. We need to try, to make our best effort, to accomplish things - no one wants to be lazy, or inefficient. But sometimes (maybe even often) things happen that make life appear unsuccessful, or even a failure.
What does that mean? If a life is a failure, unsuccessful, then should that life have never happened? The doctor who tells the expecting mother that her child will be severely handicapped and asks her to consider aborting - what does that tell us about the way we think life should be? The senior citizen in her wheelchair in a nursing home looks at you and says, "I am no good for anybody or anything now - why am I alive?"
Or perhaps you are in the middle of your life. Your spouse leaves you - with more than an empty house. Now you have house payments, alimony, the glances from neighbours and family, and you wonder how all the holidays and rituals of life are supposed to happen with this picture of the intact family destroyed - so your family - or even you - is/are a failure?
You loose your dream job and can't find another similar job, or you have a devastating accident and are handicapped for the rest of your life. You can think of many similar situations to paint the picture of failure and disaster. Economics tells us that in every society there are people who contribute nothing to the society economically - they produce no goods or services, but they use up resources of the society. While it is important to track this to help an economy function well, when we focus too much on such analysis, we lose focus of the totality of life.
Life is precious simply because it is life. Period. Every life is unique and contributes to lives in ways we cannot fathom. The woman who did not abort her supposedly handicapped child now has a 16 year old gifted young son who plays the violin beautifully - where's the handicap? The senior citizen in the wheelchair has family and friends who still think about her every day even though she has been dead almost 20 years. She was my grandmother.
Life is not the sum of the goods and/or services we generate for a group. Life is a gift that, in my deepest conviction, comes from the creator of all things, and everything the creator makes is good. But sometimes we are so selfish or short-sighted that we cannot or will not see the good in something (or someone) that/who seems to serve no purpose. The end of this kind of thinking has already been seen in the Third Reich's attempts to annihilate entire groups of people.
Perhaps we should re-evaluate how we evaluate a society: how does it deal with and treat those who give it nothing (in goods and services) in return? And while we are at it, we can hold the mirror before ourselves and conduct the same evaluation in our own lives every day. Do we protect and cherish life of every kind?
2 Kommentare:
This is a great post Mark and very timely. In our world, up to now, it has been the so called successful (the bent on getting rich/greedy) that has dominated. Now that the world is facing a dire economic situation because of that stupidity and greed, people are calling for change. There will be change (or revolution) as a result. Only by valueing life and each other above ourselves will anything good come out of it. Otherwise it becomes the survival of the fittest and what remains will not be anything worth preserving for humanity.
But shifting the wheat from the chaff (one way or another) has always been the good Lord's intention has it not?
Everybody has something in their life that makes them feel empty. Forcing depression on others is a way they learn how to cope with their own.
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