My life is getting busier, and I am finding taking the time to actually sit down, and just think, process, and write to be nearly impossible. Beyond my own busyness, the free moments that I do have are filled with pointless exercises in mindlessness and numbness. I add more and more TV shows and online activities to my schedule, possibly in an attempt to avoid the very thing that I long to find the time to do. I mourn my loss of creativity and my ever lessening attention span. For at least a decade of my life, I spent hours upon hours on end just reading and absorbing as much written information as I could. Now, the very notion of reading a book for fun seems exhausting. I also used to find such clarity and fulfillment putting pen to paper (or cursor to screen, as the case may be) and muddling through the convolution that is my brain. Beyond the clarity that came from my writing, I also used to have such creativity, such beauty, such poetry. I long to rediscover that part of my voice. As I have spent the past fifteen years developing and perfecting my academic voice, my creative voice has become stifled and halting due to lack of use.
There are so many questions swarming around my head. So many life decisions to ponder, so much philosophy to work through. Many of my classes right now focus on major issues like the meaning of life or the theories of punishment or the idea of deviance. Nearly every time I leave these classes I tell myself that I should take the time to really meditate on these questions, to truly figure out my own thoughts. So maybe this is my beginning attempt at that. Maybe this is just me rambling (which is probably more accurate).
My thoughts are rarely coherent or well developed. I process my thoughts as they come to me, not before, so I will make no apologies for this stream-of-conscious production. I make no promises about my insight or poetry or genius. My thoughts are what they are. They are scarred and broken and tainted and faltering. But they are mine and they are important.
One of the biggest questions that has been disturbing me recently is the attempts in my philosophy class at defining the value of life. As an opening premise, my professor dismissed the idea of afterlife based upon religious faith as a reason for living, as that can never be universally proven or accepted and is thus irrelevant to an intelligent academic conversation. While I can accept this notion in theory, when it really comes down to defining life’s importance, I cannot shake my belief system for the sake of academic discussion.
When discussed in this purely academic setting, the conclusion which everyone seemed to settle upon is that human life is valued as the ability to autonomously act and contribute to one’s own life. A “good life" is defined by the individual and dependent upon whether or not that individual feels that their life has value and significance.
As these thoughts and ideas where swirling around the room, I instinctively and repetitively scrawled the words that define the reason why I am still alive: “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” Having been to a place where I did not feel that my life had significance on its own , the only thing that pulled me back, that stopped that knife, that threw away those pills was the knowledge that my purpose on this earth is not my own ability to feel value and significance in this mystery called living. Instead, I remain on this earth because of one basic fact: “To live is Christ.” This is a conundrum that I still don’t fully understand. The second half of Philippians 1:21 comes easily to me. The concept of death as gain resonates inside. The latter portion of Paul's maxim calls to me in the uncertainty, in the questions, in the darkness. It is a continuous fight to accept the former.
Now, I am nowhere near the depressive suicide risk that I was three years ago. But I honestly don’t believe that I will ever be in a place where, without Christ, I would believe that life is gain. This world is harsh and broken and contains so many unanswered questions and so very much suffering. This life is not gain. But, oh, how much gain is to be had in living and dying for my lover, my Saviour.
Every day I must deny my own selfish desires to end my life in order to achieve the immeasurably great gain of everlasting life. I stave off this desire for no other reason than the commission of my Lord. I choose to remain alive solely because my God calls me to this life. I do not live because of some gain that I can find for myself, in myself. Even if I lose all my capacities, my family, my friends, my functioning mind, my very body, I will still choose to go on living because of this one basic truth: “To live is Christ.”
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