“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” – Henry David Thoreau

Why do so many people feel troubled or empty, a dull ache, a vague yearning? Why, in an age in which we have access to more wealth, entertainment, information, technology, travel, food, and comfort than virtually any people who have ever lived, are so many people quietly dissatisfied with their lives?

Of course, I’m sure there are innumerable contributing factors. Some of them are even unique to our own day and age. Social media probably contributes to this. We compare our ordinary lives to everyone’s highlight reel. It’s easy to feel the FOMO. (FOMO translation for old people: Fear of Missing Out.) We have hundreds of “friends” and fewer people to call when something goes wrong. Artificial intelligence is certainly deepening our dependence on impersonal screens. We increasingly live with our faces attached to one. But the question pre-existed these technologies.

I’ve written before about the crisis of friendship and the dwindling sense of community. As important and prominent as that theme is in my own life’s work, I don’t want to rehash that now. I’d like to address something else I’ve observed over the years, something I worked hard in my days as a teacher/professor to assist with. I think underneath all of modern layers of problems is a much older and more fundamental question: What is the point of my life?

If you keep asking that question without finding a satisfactory answer, this reflection is for you.

My Friend David

Many years ago, I had a friend named David Gundlach. David was extraordinarily successful, and I mean extraordinarily successful. He founded an insurance company in England called Hastings Direct and eventually sold it for more than $240 million. He owned a dozen homes spread all over the country. He had a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, a Bentley—basically any car he wanted. He collected art and traveled wherever and whenever he wanted. He rented one of his houses to Pete Sampras. He played poker with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. The standard buy-in for the game was $100K per night.

Then David decided to make a movie. Not some low-budget vanity project starring his friends. He worked with Dean Zanuk and produced Get Low, starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. David flew Margy and me from Elkhart to California to attend the premiere with him. The movie was extremely well received. It won film festival awards and, as I recall, even made a modest profit—which is not exactly guaranteed when you decide one day that you’d like to make a Hollywood movie.

The premiere and the festivities in the days leading up to it were surreal. Even I, a psuedo-pop-culture-illiterate was dazzled by it all. We were at events with celebrities like Nicolas Cage, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Lovitz, the actors from the movie, and other stars I didn’t know or don’t remember. (For more deets, ask Margy.) After our red-carpet, paparazzi-lined entrance to the premiere, we watched the movie, then attended a VIP reception in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where we hob knobbed with them all. Afterwards, when we went back to his home in Malibu, David, Margy, and I went out to the balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean to have a nightcap. Now think about the circumstances for a minute. Here was a man sitting at his mansion who had made hundreds of millions of dollars. He had already succeeded spectacularly in business. He could own almost anything he wanted. Now he had made a critically acclaimed movie with some of the finest actors in Hollywood. The night went perfectly. People were lined up at the after-party to congratulate him. It was a pinnacle moment.

After we rehashed the night and celebrated, I asked him what seemed like the obvious question: “Hey, what comes next? What do you want to do next?”

His answer surprised me. He hesitated with a long pause while staring out at the moonlit ocean, then said, “I’m not sure if I’m going to make another one. I thought it would feel better than this.” He went on to explain that, for him, the whole thing felt anticlimactic, and he was feeling a bit of a letdown. He wasn’t sure of anything at that moment, but maybe, he said, he would turn more of his energy toward charity.

David died unexpectedly not long afterward, at only 56 years old. In the end, charity is exactly where an enormous portion of his wealth went. Besides a $2 million endowment for scholarships for Holy Cross College, he left the remainder – ultimately $150 million after taxes – to the Elkhart Community Foundation, an astonishing gift that continues to benefit people he never met. (His story is told here.)

I loved David. This is not a reminder that “money can’t buy happiness.” If you’ve been around enough wealthy people, that becomes self-evident. It’s not that money is irrelevant. I’d rather have enough money to pay the electric bill than not have enough money to pay the electric bill. But in a way, David had run an experiment most of us will never get the opportunity to run:

What if I get everything I hoped for? What if I become rich and extraordinarily successful? What if I own large houses and dream cars and travel the world? What if I make a Hollywood movie with A-list actors? What if I fly my friends out to be with me to share in the moment? Then will I be satisfied?

I saw this up close. The result of David’s experiment was clear. There is a hole in the human person that accomplishment cannot fill. David’s experience raises a deeper question: if accomplishment, wealth, pleasure, and recognition cannot finally satisfy us, perhaps the problem is not that we haven’t gotten enough of what we want. Perhaps we have misunderstood what human beings are for.

What Are You For?

The modern world isn’t very good at answering this question. Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued that “existence precedes essence.” We exist first, and then it’s up to us to determine what we are. There is no predetermined human nature giving us our purpose. We are not made in the image and likeness of God, because there is no God. We create our own meaning. We have been given unfettered freedom.

I think much of the modern world has absorbed his conclusion without ever reading a page of Sartre.

We are constantly told to “define ourselves,” “live our own truth,” and construct an identity from within. So many modern stories have become a tired old trope. The hero is always “being true to himself,” rather than to something larger, more beautiful, and more compelling outside of himself. Meaning is no longer something awe-inspiring that we discover; it is something we manufacture. The highest form of freedom becomes the freedom to decide for ourselves what is true, what is good, and ultimately even what we are.

That sounds liberating at first, but is it? Is it really?

If there is no truth about what a human being is for, then everything eventually folds back upon the self. What do I want? What makes me happy? What feels authentic to me? What meaning do I choose to give my life? The self becomes both the question and the answer.

I think Sartre had it exactly backward. In my observation of life, as people accept Sartre’s premise as true, they don’t become any happier. In many cases, they simply become trapped in a small, self-referential world of obsessive selfishness.

On the other hand, if God exists and Christianity is true, you don’t have to invent the meaning of your life because your life already means something. God has a design, a purpose, and a goodness that has brought us into being. You are intended. You are created. You are loved. You are not an accident of matter that has to somehow create its own significance before it dies. You are a unique, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable person created by God with a purpose.

That does not mean God has hidden a tiny instruction manual somewhere telling you exactly what job to take, whom to marry, or where to live. It means something much larger. Your life takes place within the great “theo-drama” of creation and salvation. Your task is not to write the entire play yourself. It is to discover the part that is yours: to know God, to receive the particular gifts and limitations you have been given, and then to spend yourself in love of God and neighbor.

Meaning, then, is not created. It is discovered outside of oneself!

And freedom is not the power to become anything whatsoever. Freedom is the growing ability to become what you were created to be. That is a radically different understanding of the human person.

Is Christianity True?

Which brings us to the enormous question underneath all of this: Is Christianity actually true? If it is false, then none of this matters very much. Christianity may still contain beautiful stories, useful moral teachings, comforting rituals, magnificent cathedrals, and lovely Christmas music. But it is ultimately a human construction.

If it is true, however, everything changes. And there really isn’t a comfortable middle position.

Christianity makes historical claims. Jesus Christ lived. He taught. He was crucified. His followers claimed to have encountered Him alive afterward. And Christianity makes an even more staggering claim: that this Jesus was not merely a wise teacher or religious reformer, but the incarnate Son of God. Either something extraordinary happened in first-century Judea, or Christianity rests upon an extraordinary mistake. Jesus either rose from the dead or He did not. And He claimed to be Divine. He either is who He said He is—the Son of God—or He was a lunatic, or worse still, a liar. The real, actual, bodily resurrection of Jesus matters. Did He really rise from the dead?

I believe He did. And I believe He is who He claimed to be. So put me down as a hearty “Yes!” to the question of whether Christianity is true. But once you say yes to that question, another question immediately follows—and this one may be even more uncomfortable:

Is Christianity like the music player in your car? Is it something nice to have? It makes the trip better, but the car works perfectly well without it. Or is Christianity more like the engine? If it’s the engine, taking it out doesn’t merely make the ride less enjoyable. The car no longer works.

Christianity as a Compartment?

I think a remarkable number of Christians live as though Christianity were the music player. They believe in God. They go to church (when it’s convenient). They try to be decent people. They say some prayers, especially when they are asking for things. They volunteer. They give money to charity. They may sincerely love God and consider their faith an important part of their lives.

Those are all good things. But notice the phrase: a part of their lives.

Faith sits alongside work, school, marriage, children, money, vacations, entertainment, politics, friendships, sports, hobbies, and everything else that fills the calendar. Christianity becomes one compartment among many. Perhaps it is even the most important compartment. But it is still a compartment. It does not necessarily govern the others. It does not reorder everything else. It does not become the transforming principle around which the rest of life is built.

And that arrangement makes perfect sense if Christianity is merely a helpful spiritual addition to an otherwise complete human life.

But is that what Christianity claims to be?

To be continued…