Lifeboat Business

...You know that lifeboat or 'desert island' question that people love to throw at you, which also happens to make you roll your eyes with disgust at how pathetically unoriginal the question is?

Well, if your ears or eyes have never been graced by such a wondrous question as this, it is where you need to choose someone to throw off the lifeboat or to kill from the island, because there aren't enough resources for all of you to survive with - so someone has to go. Out of the candidates to pluck out from your sight, there'll usually be a lawyer, a crippled child, a pregnant mother, a peasant, a doctor and yourself. And the choice is all yours to wrestle with.

I just don't like that question, at all. It just drives me up the wall like a legless fly - or something. People try to be all smart and say - right, I'd keep the doctor because if one of us is ill... blah blah blah, but really, if you're stuck in a lifeboat, the doctor won't have anything to cure you with, so what good, may I ask? "Make sure you drink lots of tea and rest lots and keep away from the cold" - well thanks very much, but I'm out here in a lifeboat, with limited amounts of water on board, which as you may know I need to share with these other people I've chosen not to throw off, and we're all cramped and I can't sleep and then and then and then. And then, obviously, no one would get rid of the crippled child - no, this would be terribly politically incorrect. Pregnant mother? No, it would be taking the life of her unborn too. Realistically, though, would she have the right resources to nurture her baby before and after his birth...? So really, this question that appears to raise great moral issues, just doesn't. It's a foolish question altogether.

Or that's what I thought, until very recently, when it came crashing into me from a different direction; it lost its quality of 'supposedly moral question to think about for 5 minutes' to become a question about the pattern I live my life by, every day.

I'm reading a book at the moment "Searching For God Knows What", which seeks to offer an answer as to why it might be the deepest longings in our hearts are there. And why it would only make sense that since the Fall, since God no longer is the one whom we walk in the Garden with, we restlessly try to fill our lives with the approval of others in order to recover our loss of identity and worth.

You see, Miller would say that we have always been created to be validated and approved of by someone other than ourselves - outside of ourselves. When Adam and Eve walked in the Garden, they were completely secure. So much so that they walked naked - no kidding. Man's glory - his security, his understanding of value, his feeling of purpose, his feeling of rightness with his Maker, his security for eternity - was given by God, but when that relationship was broken - one so pure and free of insecurity that they didn't even notice they were naked - they knew it right away. "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." And God said, "Who told you that you were naked?". All the glory, their glory which came from God, was gone.

"I wondered at how terrible it must have felt, at the fear of no longer feeling God, at the ache of emptiness and the sudden horrifying awarness of self. God have mercy."

We spend our lives playing a massive lifeboat 'game', the very lifeboat I was referring to earlier on. We spend our lives stating our cases, convincing people why it is we shouldn't be the ones thrown off. We are pining for other people, people we esteem to be in authority, to tell us that we are good, right, okay with the world and eternally secure - we need to win their approval so they can consider us worthy enough to stay aboard. We constantly compare ourselves to others, to figure out our worth.

"It makes sense that if a plant is seperated from the sun, it dies, and that if people are seperated from God, they die. And so now it feels as if we live on a planet where there is just a little bit of water left, poisoned as it is, and we all are trying to get it and drink it so we can stay alive. But what we really need is God. What we really need is somebody who loves us so much we don't worry about death, about our hair thining, about other drivers pulling in front of us on the road, about whether people are poor or rich, good-looking or ugly, about whether we feel lonely or about whether or not we are wearing clothes. We need this; we need this so we can love other people purely and not for selfish gain, we need this so we can see everbody as equals, we need this so our relationships can be sincere, we need this so we can stop kicking ourselves around, we need this so we can lose all self-awareness and find ourselves for the first time, not by realizing some dream, but by being told who we are by the only Being who has the authority to know, by that I mean the Creator."

When looking at Jesus' life, we see that among other things, he felt hunger and thirst, and He slept and rested, but had no interest for the lifeboat politics we fight in everyday.
"He believed a great deal of absurd ideas, such as we should turn the other cheek if somebody hits us, we should give somebody our coat even if they just ask for our shirt, we should be willing to give up all our money and follow Him, we should try our hardest to make peace, we should treat poor people the same as we treat the rich, we should lay down our lives for our friends... It seemed He believed we should take every opportunity to fail in the lifeboat game, not for the sake of failing, but because there wasn't anything to win in the first place. It was as if He didn't believe the economy we live within had validity. No part of Him was deceived by its power."

My ears are currently seduced by: The Beatles - Revolver