Dancing with wisdom - chapter 8

The question of Being includes identity but is also much more than that. Being is about who we are in relationship to ourself. 'This includes our intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual state. It is closely linked with our identity—the way we look at and understand ourself.

We can think about identity on many different levels. Who am I? We can answer that question in an endless variety of ways. At the time of writing this, I am in my mid-fifties, a bald man who is a husband, father, doctor, psychiatrist and of South Asian origin but brought up in the UK. This summary can only go so far in terms of understanding my identity, The greatest influences on this question of identity comes from our own personality and temperament, along with the influence of parents, roots and our earliest experiences.

Although I was born in India, I came to the UK as a toddler. I initially spoke Hindi. The advice given to parents at the time was to speak to their children only in one language, to avoid hindering their progress and education. Many decades later, we know that this approach is misjudged and unhelpful, but such thinking moulded my early development. I grew up speaking primarily English, forgetting most of my Hindi! When I went to school with mainly other English children, I knew I was different. There was a degree of racist abuse from them that reinforced to me that I was different. I began to question my identity and belonging. To complicate matters further, my parents spoke to each other in Punjabi and to me in English! Punjabi is often regarded as less refined and cultured than Hindi with English being considered to have the highest status and prestige!

As a family we still identified with our North Indian roots. Along with a regular diet of Bollywood Hindi films, I found myself feeling that I belonged more to my Asian origins than my West European English environment. Although I could not fully understand the language, the songs and themes of those Bollywood movies awakened a deep longing and yearning in my heart for something secure, permanent and transcendent. This was an age well before the internet and the communication advances to which we are all accustomed now. The lack of actual engagement with family and friends in India created in my mind a fantasy world of perfection and idealism.

My first visit to India after moving to England was at the age of eight. My heart had always leant towards India. But when I went back for those three months, I felt that I didn’t fit in. I neither spoke Hindi well nor did I look Indian. I was told that I appeared to be very English, which created confusion about my identity. When I was in England, India was my home; and when I was in India, England was my home. I was always asking the question, "Who am I?"

As I have grown older and discussed this question of identity with an increasing variety of people, I have learnt that this experience is very common. Even those who have not been immigrants have something about their past that makes them feel different from others. It does not matter whether that difference appears to someone else to be significant or not. What matters is the impact on ourselves. It is similar to a distinction often made about major surgery and minor surgery. Being entirely objective we would classify a heart bypass as major surgery and removal of an ingrowing toenail as minor surgery. But for the patient, any surgery is major surgery because it is our body that is being operated on! Regardless of the apparent seriousness of the experience, it is the depth of impact on our thinking that will affect our personal identity.

A sense of identity is strongly tied to our perceived self-worth. So much of what we base our self-worth on can be taken from us. We tend to base this on performance. For me, as a child and teenager, it came from academic success. When I lost that at medical school by failing exam after exam, I crumbled inside. It forced me to search for an identity I could not lose.

Every human-based identity is temporary. We will eventually retire from our job; our role as a spouse or a parent will one day be rudely interrupted by death—ours or that of our loved ones. The only secure identity comes from the One who is transcendent and outside of time.

The consequence of this search is that the ultimate place in which to seek an unshakeable sense of self-worth is from understanding how deeply we are accepted and loved by God. Amidst all the changes of life, God is the only feature which remains unchanging and constant. When anyone asks me who I am, I can answer, "I am a deeply loved and accepted child of God", It is less a matter of who I am than whose I am. While that realisation can be comforting, it’s only when we understand the basis for this acceptance that life-transforming change becomes possible.

How do I get a sense of being a completely accepted and loved child of God? For most of my early life I would have answered this question on the basis of my performance or behaviour. Expressed simply, God loves those who do good and He punishes those who do wrong. The problem with this paradigm, as common and natural as it is to think like this, is the question of how do I define what is good and what is wrong? Do I judge only by the laws of the nation? In part, yes. But those laws are subject to variation. Also, complying with external laws says nothing about where my heart is. It’s like insisting that a small child say sorry when they are still angry. One might get a verbal apology, but everything about their body language shows they do not really mean it! I can do any number of apparently good deeds, but my heart can remain filled by feelings of superiority, or jealousy or self-recrimination. It was this realisation that ushered me towards the spiritual quest of my late teens.

Christ Himself expressed this incisively during his famous Sermon on the Mount, as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. He equated anger with murder and lustful thoughts with adultery:

Raca was an Aramaic word of contempt, a way of dismissively shunning the other person by indicating that they are of no consequence. Jesus goes beyond the insult to the underlying attitude this reveals. He does the same with lustful thoughts:

These dauntingly high standards challenge the very thoughts and attitudes of our hearts. While lustful thoughts can be deeply private and personal, Jesus refuses to accept that they are trivial or unimportant. With such standards, it’s not enough not to resort to physical acts of violence or adultery. It is what is in the heart that is as important. Setting such standards for performance is exceptionally challenging. Who can claim to be pure and without fault?

What about degrees of goodness, the essence of what can be called religious thinking? It is such a natural way of thinking about life. But it is deeply flawed and rarely questioned or challenged. This bell-shaped curve helps explain varying degrees of goodness:

I am not referring to any one religion in particular but to the entire premise behind religious thinking. Whatever our religious background, our professed faith, or even lack of any faith, there’s the same premise at the back of our minds.

What is this premise?

It is that God (or the universe or even myself) somehow accepts me on the basis of what I do. By this thinking, the more good I do, the more is God (or the universe or how I feel about myself) likely to accept me. That sounds innocent enough. But it has significant ramifications.

Let me try to explain. If God accepts me on the basis of what I do, what exactly should I be doing and how much doing is good enough? If we think of the above classic bell-shaped distribution curve as a model for goodness with numbers of people on the y-axis and levels of goodness on the x-axis, then we can agree on the outliers—those people who differ very significantly from the mass of our observations. On the one extreme, we have those who most of us would agree were good people—Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are obvious examples. At the other end of the curve are those we would generally consider bad— such as Hitler and Stalin.

The rest of us are somewhere in the middle. The problem is that we can only agree on the extremes. But using this paradigm of doing good, where do we draw the line as to who is good? If we arbitrarily say 51% goodness and everyone above that deserves to be accepted, what about the unfortunate person who is only 50% good by their own deeds? And the person who is 52% good. Is it entirely fair that they should be accepted?

Let us take two examples relating to our day to day experience. Driving along the road we go through a red light. The policeman stops us and proceeds to hand out a ticket. Imagine saying, 'Give me a break, police officer! I’ve been driving for more than thirty years and this is the first time I have gone through a red light!' Could thirty years of faultless driving compensate for one offence?

Or, to be more extreme, let us say we murder someone. Could we make a plea to the judge "Your honour, I know I did wrong, but I have had problems with anger all my life and this is only the first time that I actually allowed it to get out of control.'? Could fifty years of no criminal conviction balance out one murder? It doesn’t make sense. Religious thinking says that God weighs my good deeds against my bad, and so long as the good balances out the bad, He will accept me. But we know that in everyday life that does not work.

In my own personal journey, I’ve been aware of how much religious thinking permeates me. In my teens, immediately before exams, I would pray much more. It was as if I was trying to prove to God that He should bless my studies because of my level of devotion to Him. In my first year at university, I struggled with questions of identity and belonging that also led to a period of depression. I became acutely aware of how much within me was not right and was dishonouring to God. I could do apparently good things on the outside, but my heart was filled with so much which was flawed that I lacked congruency between the outside and inside. (For more on this topic see the 15 minute video at drsunil.com/me.)

The first step has been coming to faith in Christ as the One who has lived the perfect life. Even so, I still find within me a propensity for religious thinking. I know now that I am accepted on the basis of what Christ has done on the cross and not according to my own performance. Despite this powerful realisation, it remains easy for my emotional health to be governed by my own perception of how I am doing. If I perceive myself to be doing well, such as doing the things I need to do or getting appreciation from others, while that can be a good thing, there is a hidden danger. It is easy for that sense of feeling good about how I am doing to cross the line over to a sense of superiority or arrogance with regard to other people. In contrast, when I am struggling to keep up, when I am disappointing others, there is the temptation to go towards despondency or even despair. But, let us assume that the basis of my acceptance had nothing to do with my performance? What if it were based on the performance of someone who was perfect in every way? What if my acceptance were based on a different life which had been sacrificed for me so I could be right with God? In this case my acceptance comes from trusting someone who has made a path whereby I can come to God; it is based not on my merit but on the merit of Christ.

That is why the cross of Christ and the Gospel are such good news.

I love the simplicity and depth of this old Anglican prayer:

I struggle with religion because it gets in the way of experiencing and knowing how much I am truly loved. Religion puts my own performance ahead of the One who has done everything for me. I need reminding of that every day. A simple daily reminder of that is the four simple questions, and answers, which I aim to repeat to myself each morning. They were first told to me by one of the ministers of our church, Rico Tice. I think they describe an important key to living a life that has a deep sense of belonging and inner security.

Life only makes sense ultimately in relationship to others. The two greatest commandments by my favourite teacher are 'to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength', and 'to love your neighbour as you love yourself. It’s hard, if not impossible, to come up with anything better than that! Living for myself and my own selfish desires can never be enough. It is good to remember that 'the whole world consists of other people'! How we relate to others tells a lot about ourselves.

The apocryphal story of a wise man travelling between two cities illustrates this. On the way, he meets someone travelling from City A to where this wise man has just been, City B. The traveller asks him, "What are the people in City B like?" His reply is to ask, "What were the people in City A like?". The traveller replies, "Those in City A were nasty, mean, cruel and vindictive". The wise man replies, "Then, that is what the people in City B will be like". A little while later, the wise man meets someone travelling in the opposite direction. He is asked the same question but this time about City A. He asks this second traveller, "What are the people in City B like?" The traveller replies that those in City B are kind, compassionate and honest. You may have deduced that the wise man replies, "That is how you will find the people in City A!"

The parable illustrates one of the surprising generalities in human relationships, that other people can act as mirrors, reflecting the attitude of others. The key with these people is to initiate the attitude that you want to see returned.

On Sundays I attend a large church with my family, All Souls, Langham Place in Central London, I have noticed on a number of occasions how my state of mind affects the quality of conversations with those who are there during coffee time after the service. When I am positive and upbeat, everyone else seems to share this cheerfulness. What is fascinating is how the opposite also happens. When I am less motivated and I feel inward looking, everyone else seems to share what may even lapse into moroseness. Mirroring our state of mind with that of others is a vital skill if we are to develop satisfying and mutually fulfilling relationships.

The great part of our meaning and fulfilment in life comes from the relationships with which we surround ourselves. Early in life, we have limited choices as to who that is with. However, as we grow older, the challenge is to begin questioning the assumptions and worldview that we learned from our past in order to see if they still hold up with the reality developing before us. We begin to learn that not everything that others say can be trusted. This means we have to learn discernment about the motives and intentions of others. We make and break friendships and relationships. Some of this happens because of the pain and hurt we cause each other. At times it can simply be the result of no longer being in physical proximity or because our paths do not cross. We may, and often do, outgrow those relationships as we sense different priorities and ways of looking at life and the world.

Not everyone will stay on the journey with you. It is important to realise that 'that’s all right'. I wish I had understood this truth earlier in my life. Many times I have found myself putting too much expectation on the relationships around me and finding myself hurt and disappointed. The challenge is to maintain a tender heart while keeping a tough skin.

My faith journey to Christ brought me into conflict with my immediate family. No matter how hard I tried, it was clear that we were on different wavelengths. This was a particular disappointment for my parents. While I accepted I needed to love and honour them as my parents, I also saw I needed to create an identity elsewhere for my life decisions and community. I became part of a church community that helped me understand and grow in my understanding of Christ. It was also a place from which I could continue to honour and respect my parents in spite of the clear differences in our faiths. A great bonus of this time was that I met the woman who would eventually become my wife!

For a number of years after my spiritual awakening, I looked up to people who were religious. I admired their dedication to God and their Biblical knowledge. They seemed so strong and sorted out that I wanted to be like them. For many years, I hung around those kinds of people. During that time, I grew a lot and learned a lot about God. But, unknowingly, I also moved progressively further away from being a real person. I became increasingly religious but less of what I now understand to be spiritual. My perspective on that time is that I was actually losing touch with many other aspects of what it means to be human—my vulnerability and pain, my need for other people, my wilfulness and inner darkness. The sudden death of my close friend Bunty was the most traumatic of a number of wake-up calls for me. I had to begin looking at why I couldn’t get close to people and trust them at a very deep level, and why I felt further and further away from God no matter how much I understood about Him.

I discovered people with whom I felt safe opening up to about my pain and inadequacies. As I grew closer to others, my vulnerability increased and I needed them more. The safe people around me loved me exactly as I was, and I learned to open up about my struggles, sinfulness and imperfections. I began growing as a person and learned a great deal more about God than I had known when I had been focussed on being religious.

It was from there that I became better able to recognise people who were not authentic even though they seemed very spiritual. I found that I was able to pick better friends—people who really knew God and his ways, instead of those using a great amount of religious language and activities. These were people with a true ability to develop relationships, who were able to understand and love others while being honest about themselves and about life.

Those who are closest to us will have profound implications on our future direction and growth. It’s important that if we are committed to our growth and development, that we find what Henry Cloud calls 'safe people'. Such people help us in three ways. First, they enable us to become more of who we were created to be. Second, they bring us closer to God. Third, they help us to build relations with other people.

So many of our relationships can be merely a transaction. It is so easy to treat others as objects that we use for our own ends and purposes. We forget that inanimate objects are what we use, but that we relate to human beings. Although in many cases we cannot avoid basing our relationships on a transaction, it’s vital to recognise that our fellow human beings are also made in the image of God. This is the case regardless of their gender, race, level of intelligence, religious identity or sexual orientation. Learning to love and accept others for who they are and not only for what we can get out of them is a hallmark of wisdom and a vital human skill.

At the same time, it’s vital to recognise that not all relationships are of equal value to us personally. We can only relate meaningfully to a finite number of people. Psychologists talk of Dunbar’s Number, a concept developed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar which states that the maximum number stable relationships which an individual can maintain is about 150. That does not mean social media should have no place in our lives, but we do need to accept that the number of people with whom we can sustain meaningful relationships is finite.

After my relationship with God must come, in my case, the relationship with my spouse. This comes ahead of that with my children. Indeed, as a husband and father, I value the idea that the best way to love your children is to love their mother. Beyond this close group is my social network, work colleagues, my extended family and friends. How do I view and look at those relationships?

Proverbs talks about this in terms of the righteous and the wicked. When we read such words, we immediately think of those whose lives are moral and those whose lives are immoral. However, that is only a part of the meaning. In the original Hebrew language, the words for righteous (tzedeg and mishpat) have a strong connotation of relationships. Bruce Waltke, a commentator on Proverbs, wrote, 'The righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community; the wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.' So, a righteous person sees everything they have been given, including time, money, resources and social connections, as for the good of those around them. By contrast, the wicked see everything they have as something to be used for their own selfish purposes.

The key difference is seeing that we are accountable in our relationships. The ultimate accountability is to God, who has provided everything for us. When I grasp how much God has secured for me in Christ, I can begin to be at peace with the person He has made me, with both my positive and my negative experiences. This is not a one-time experience but an ongoing and growing realisation, day by day and through even the different seasons of life.

The experience includes learning to forgive others for the way they have disappointed us or let us down. When someone hurts or disappoints us, it’s easy either to attack that person or to withdraw from the relationship in a negative way. However, it is only in mathematics that two negatives make a positive. In relationships, reacting negatively to a person who is negative towards us can never be ultimately helpful. Refusing to forgive those who hurt us and holding grudges is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. The power of forgiveness brings a well-documented benefit to our emotional and psychological health.

The power to forgive comes from a deepening awareness and understanding of how much we have already been forgiven through Christ. As we grow in awareness and sensitivity to our flaws and weaknesses, we can look with compassion to others who let us down or disappoint us. That is so different from a world where it is easy to condemn and criticise others who we feel are in the wrong. By focusing on the faults of others, repeatedly rehearsing how we have been wronged or betrayed, we play the victim and take the responsibility for change off ourselves and put it onto other people. The tragedy of this way of thinking is the trap of blaming others, wasting time and energy on the hurts of the past. At extreme levels this can lead to hatred and vilification of complete groups of people. The Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp and then internal exile for criticising Josef Stalin in a private letter. In The Gulag Archipelago he wrote:

Maybe this is why we enjoy criticising others so much; we are diverted from looking at our own conflicted and corrupted hearts. It’s much easier to talk about the sins and mistakes of others. That raises the question of the terrible evil that is evident in the world around us. We will come to that shortly. But, before we do, let us look at a helpful way to group people as we relate to and interact with them.

Categorising people may seem unduly harsh—especially if there is no self-reflection. However, it is very apparent from both our own experience and the scientific research that not everyone is the same in their outlook on the world. That means we cannot treat all people in the same way. Even though we are all of equal value and worth, everyone differs in what is important to them and how they process life and their experiences. Some of those differences relate to temperament and personality while others relate to deeper aspects of moral values.

John Maxwell’s Law of the Inner Circle is a good shortcut for deciding who we should spend time and energy with as it forces us to think about our priorities, vision for life and values. His 'law' states that our potential in life is determined by those who are closest to us. This closeness goes way beyond physical proximity to those with whom we feel emotionally connected, as well as those to whom we look, respect or admire. Another way of expressing this is …​ "who are the travel companions you are bringing along with you on the journey of life?" Henry Cloud provides a useful distinction between different kinds of people. The perceptiveness of these distinctions has roots in the timeless wisdom of Biblical Scripture.

As we look at these three types of person— Wise, Foolish and Evil —it is worth remembering that elements of all three are in each one of us. We can certainly apply the framework to others. But every one of us, if we are realistic about our own heart, can see aspects of all three within ourselves. The key question is:

What does this person do when truth comes to them?

This is where it gets even more personally challenging. We can talk about these issues in the abstract sense, but what does it mean for us with this life that we have been given? When we wake up in the morning, there are jobs to do and errands to run. We have responsibilities, but what are we called to do that only we can do? This lack of clarity is especially true in the day-to-day routine of life with the myriad of choices at our disposal.

The early twentieth century American evangelist Dawson Trotman said something that I find an enormous challenge. ‘Never do anything that someone else can and will do, when there is so much of importance to be done which others cannot or will not do’.

There are plenty of good and even noble things that we could do. How do we decide which ones to make our responsibility, guided by the wisdom that ‘the best is the enemy of the good’. The key is finding and walking into whatever is our God-given calling. It is important to grasp that this is not a simple one-off process. It will involve experimentation and failure to such an extent that failure is an important part of the process. The American spiritual and community leader Parker Palmer addresses this with his question, ‘Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?’ We tell ourself this is a path that we want to take, but how many of our choices and decisions come from our ego or desire to impress others? There is a calling within us that we also need to recognise and respond to.

The Bible asserts that God has prepared good work for us to do that is unique to us. ‘For we are God’s handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do’ (Letter to the Ephesians ch 2 v10). The word for handiwork is the same word from which we get the word poem. It is a work of art with God being the master craftsman. It is a reminder of understanding and embracing ‘the good works which God prepared in advance for us to do’. The first part of that verse also reminds us that we are ‘God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus’. In other words, all our life experiences are going in a certain direction, equipping us for unique tasks and opportunities. The disappointments and struggles we have had can become the training ground for learning how to help others who are going through similar experiences. We can empathise and support them better because we personally know what it’s like to experience the same things.

There’s a universal deep longing in our hearts for greater meaning and purpose. Our lives can feel ordinary and mediocre, but that’s not what we are called to. The danger comes from confusing task with the nature of our sense of identity. What we are doing may not appear to be particularly glamorous or high profile, but that does not take away its intrinsic worth. There is One who sees and knows all.

We all want to have something meaningful to do with lives

that can seem rather mundane and ordinary on many levels. Martin Luther King said,

When considered like that, there is no work that should be considered minor or trivial when it is done for the One who sees and knows all things. Every day can be a masterpiece. The between-the-Wars English philosopher and Unitarian minister L. P. Jacks wrote:

What I love about this description is the way that all life is seen as one complete whole and not a collection of competing or conflicting pursuits.

Our obsession with work and success is one of the great flaws of modern, 21^st century life. When we build our identity around our work, if we succeed we are in danger of becoming proud and arrogant; if we do not succeed we risk feeling devastated and sinking into despair.

As discussed earlier, making work the basis of our identity is a form of idolatry. The word ‘idol’ refers to something that has been elevated to being more important and significant in our life than the God who is the originator and source of the universe and every good thing in the world. Work becomes too important to us and is our ultimate source of security and satisfaction. Work was never meant for that—it is a good thing that risks easily becoming an ultimate thing. We risk attributing to work qualities that are God-like and that only God can ultimately provide.

How can we strike the balance? How can we find joy in what we do without becoming so obsessed that we neglect our health, family, friends and important relationships? How can we avoid feeling paralysed with fear, doubt and even self-loathing when we make a mistake?

The spiritual awakening of John Coltrane, the famous jazz musician, changed his attitude about his work and ability to make music. He realised that before his spiritual awakening, making music was mainly about himself. He made music to make himself feel good about himself. However, once God filled his soul, the music became about other people. Music became a means to serve them.

This insight is liberating by showing that all work, no matter how apparently trivial it may seem, has intrinsic worth and dignity. Work becomes a means of serving and blessing other people in the same way that God seeks to bless and provide for us. Martin Luther uses Psalm 145 to teach that God feeds everyone he has made. How does he feed us? God feeds us through other people’s work. The farm girl who milks the cow; the truck driver who delivers the milk; and the storekeeper who sells the milk. All work is God’s work, and all work has intrinsic dignity.

We tend to look beyond serving our neighbour to self-advancement for its own sake in order to make ourselves feel better than other people. C. S. Lewis builds on this with:

The result is that pride drives us to take on more work than we should, or to neglect ourselves and our important relationships. Pride can also justify our own laziness!

The song ‘Before You I Kneel, My Master and My Maker’ by Keith and Kristyn Getty captures the sense of finding the right balance:

What do I find so personally helpful about this song?

When I start my day, it helps me to remember that what I do is firstly an offering to God. Everything that I do and that I have originates in what God has already done for me. My life is a response to His goodness, love and care—the day that lies before me, the health and strength I enjoy, the skills He has given me and the opportunities to serve Him through other people. I cannot and must not take them for granted as they are all manifestations of His abundant grace.

At the same time, life and work have challenges, problems and difficulties. It is easy to think that a life with no challenges would be better; yet it is just these problems and difficulties that build the qualities of grit and resilience into us. I need, as the second verse of the Getty song describes it, ‘patience and peace to shape all my labour’—to prevent frustrations destroying my peace of mind and my security in God’s provision. Life may not be going the way that I want; there may be difficult colleagues and challenging situations. All of these are, I believe, a part of | God’s plan for refining and developing me.

Finally, we want to know that whatever we do has been meaningful and worthwhile. We want to know that however little glamour or drama there may be about what we do, whatever it is has made a difference in some way. We want something meaningful to do with our lives that can, on many levels, seem rather mundane and ordinary, Mother Teresa’s powerful quote explains that, “We may not be able to do great things, but we can do small things with great love’.' We can put our whole devotion, energy and passion into the most mundane of tasks. We can sweep streets with the commitment that Michelangelo brought to painting pictures, Beethoven composing music and Shakespeare to writing poetry.

How can we enjoy the journey of our life without regret? Our legacy is to do just that. Remembering that our time is finite will give us the wisdom to make the most of this limited period. I felt this powerfully after the sudden death of my friend Bunty, to whom this book is dedicated.

Life has consequences. What we do matters. If you disagree, try playing with the opposite idea—that our life does not matter and what we do has no consequence. Which would you rather? Would you dare to make such a radical claim publicly at a funeral, or even privately, about your own life? In reality our day-to-day lives oscillate in a space between those two extremes. When we are confident and optimistic, how can life not hold great promise and opportunity? However, when disappointment or even disaster descends, how easily do we fall into despondency and despair.

Death is the great leveller. We try to ignore the reality of death. But if we can grasp its finality, we can find a way to accept with confidence a life moving towards this inevitable stage.

‘The Western-style secular view lacks any willingness to explore or accept the concept of anything more than this life. As Czeslaw Milosz described it, the true opium of the masses is not religion but the pervasive belief that this life is all there is. We see that in books with titles such as 100 Things to Do before You Die. The problem that belief creates is that there is only a finite amount of time within which we can experience all there is to experience. It creates, even at a subtle level, a sense of scarcity and fear that we are somehow missing out.

We live with deep longings and disappointments that this world can never seem to quite fulfil. These are the clues to the deep desires we have that can never seem to be satisfied. There are also profound implications for how we see what our life is about ultimately. Life offers more than what is going on around us. C. S. Lewis expands on this by affirming the Biblical claim that, as ‘spiritual beings with a human existence’, we have an eternal future ahead of us. Truly grasping that I am going to live forever puts into perspective that there are some things to which I need to pay relatively little attention and others requiring a great deal of attention. Take the example of an increasingly bad temper. If I live to the age of eighty, that bad temper may not be a particular problem. But if I am going to live for an infinite length of time, that bad temper will, over time, become a literal living hell for me. C. S. Lewis’s far-reaching conclusion is:

The choices that we make in this life, what we choose to focus on and allow to dominate our thinking, have profound implications for the person that we become. The sobering realisation is that those choices will continue to dominate us into eternity.

This is the importance of legacy. Our lives are headed in one direction or another. We have the great luxury of being able to change this direction in order to grow into all that God has for us. The alternative, a terrifying one, is to grow increasingly towards self-centredness or allowing our ego to dominate. Which will it be?

I first picked up A Resilient Life by Gordon MacDonald when I turned forty. Even though that seems a very long time ago, I still remember the profound impact that the book had on me then and continues to have now. At the time, I was confronting midlife questions and self-doubt about what I had achieved or, perhaps more accurately, not achieved in my life. It seemed to me that so many others had achieved much more, progressed further along the road of their calling and developed more mastery of their destiny. This is a dangerous way to think; it had all the ingredients of a typical midlife crisis.

But midlife doesn’t have to be a crisis. It can also be the chrysalis of something more wonderful and beautiful. Many of us are like those caterpillars longing to be butterflies. We sense that we are capable of so much more than what we see in front of us or have achieved so far. But as we become older, it’s easy to deny those longings as the mere foolishness of youth. It is easy to tell ourselves that our best years are now behind us and that we ourselves are ‘over the hill’.

What I found so refreshing in Gordon MacDonald’s book was the powerful challenging of those assumptions. There is a beautifully simple analogy that drew me into the book. Imagine the marathon runner, Gordon MacDonald says. (In my case I do indeed have to imagine it as I have never run such a distance!) The race—all twenty-six miles and 365 yards (or 42.2 kilometres if you prefer) is long, gruelling and tough. In spite of all these hard conditions, the runner plans to pace themselves correctly in order to finish the race with a sprint. They do not just hobble across the finish line— they aim to end with a final flourish, a joyful celebratory crescendo for all they have come to do so far. The resilience of this final flourish is a fitting tribute to all that has happened up to that point.

MacDonald defined ‘the way of resilience’ as ‘going through adversity, coming out stronger so they are now an inspiration to others, getting better as time goes by’.

For someone who is getting older, that is enormously attractive! Resilience matters increasingly because, as we have been exploring in this book:

In that context Gordon MacDonald’s imperatives are challenging:

MacDonald says,

Of course, we can be called to leave the race at any point. None of us knows when that might be; on 17 March 2014, I was painfully reminded of that. But if we focus on what we have control over, we, too, need to pace ourselves for the long haul. Here was the clincher for me. The marathon runner aims to end the race with a sprint. After all those miles of running, she aims to have enough reserve so that she can end with a final burst of energy.

MacDonald reflects on how many of the characters that God used in the Old Testament tend to be either very young or very old. Of the men and women who are later on in life, there are people like Abraham or Moses in their sixties, seventies and eighties. This point has encouraged me for years and excites me about the future. We should be pacing our lives for the long haul such that our most fruitful and productive years can be our later years—in our own sixties, seventies and eighties!

For a world that celebrates youth and looks with nostalgia on the past, that is a powerfully subversive idea. When this idea is tied in with a favourite quote of mine, we have a powerful manifesto for the future: ‘In Christ, our bad things can turn out for good, our good things can never be lost, and the best is yet to come.

Rather than slowing down into retirement, we realise that our best years are rising up in front of us. In some mysterious and wonderful way, He is creating a tapestry for the future from the good, and from bad and even ugly in our life.

What can make this even more powerful is realising that leaving the world, which we all ultimately have to do, speaks to an understanding that covers the very end of time and the end of the world. Now, that really is an all-encompassing subject! It would be hard to describe anything broader than that!

What will happen at the end of time? How will the world end? How will our lives end? Where is history heading to? Is there any sense or coherence about the complex and challenging world in which we live? That question has been the subject of Hollywood movies and popular science fiction novels down the ages. Popular movies and novels have a great role to play as good fun and escapism, but aside from that we have to get on with the predictably mundane as life unfolds. Could there be another narrative? What does the world’s bestselling and, arguably, least read and understood book say about the end of the world?

The Bible reveals that heaven and the new creation will be so much more than a simple idea characterised by sitting on a cloud, playing a harp, singing endlessly or even going on one long holiday! Heaven isn’t even our final destination when we die! It is only, as it were, a transit lounge for the new creation. In fact, the Bible makes clear that we don’t even ascend to heaven! The new creation is heaven, at the end of time, coming down to earth.

The God I Don’t Understand by Chris Wright addresses this:

How, then should we live?

There is much more that we could explore together, but the purpose of this book is to encourage you to hunger and thirst for the path of wisdom. With such rich answers to these Four Vital Questions, what could our quest for wisdom look like?