Is life a journey or a playground? A journey has a destination, and it has a road that leads to that destination. A playground doesn’t lead anywhere; there are no roads, just a lot of open space to play in. I think most of us like to say that life is a journey; but I think most of us probably want to live as though life were a playground.
One of the troubles with language is that we’re able to say one thing with our mouth, and say quite a lot of different things by our actions. And it’s not so much that we even intend to deceive others all the time; sometimes we fool even ourselves about who we are. So it’s easy to say, “Life is a journey.” But the really important question to ask is, “Is my life a journey? Do I have a definite goal and direction, or am I just kind of wandering around from place to place?”
I like to think of us all as more or less like ships that have been put out to sea. A ship is a good analogy to human life because you can sail a ship, but a ship also tends to move around by itself even when you’re not sailing it. And our lives are like that. That’s one of the reasons why it is so important for us to choose a destination for ourselves. Because if we don’t choose a destination, the winds and the waves end up choosing for us.
"we are essentially sailing a ship that belongs to someone else, and we are returning it to its owner—hopefully in good condition"
But how do you choose a destination for your life? Now, if you owned the ship that you were sailing, you might say, “Well, it’s my ship. I will sail wherever I want to sail.” Many people—many Christian people—live life in just that fashion, but the Bible teaches us something different. The Bible teaches that each of us is sailing in a borrowed ship. We cannot do whatever we want with the ship, because we don’t own the ship. And we cannot simply sail the ship wherever we want, because there will come a time when we have to return that ship to its port of origin. We may stop at fun and pretty places along the way; we may stop at desolate and barren places along the way; but we are essentially sailing a ship that belongs to someone else, and we are returning it to its owner—hopefully in good condition. And so the question I want to bring before you today is: since you and I are not simply sailing off each to his own place, but since you and I together are on a single journey, with a single destination, how do we find our way to that destination? And the answer is: we follow those who have gone on before us.
In order to follow those who have gone on before us, we must seek to hear their voice. These include voices from the Bible, but they also include voices from the whole history of the Church: people who were every bit as human as you and I, but who were deeply passionate about their faith. And if we are to follow in their footsteps, we too need to be passionate. Sometimes we get the idea that we could be people of faith without passion, or that we could learn without passion.
Musicians like Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach
Scientists like Galileo and Pascal
Philosophers like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas
Jerome, William Tyndale, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis
People who devoted their lives to charity like St. Francis and Mother Theresa
Martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I just mentioned, was as a German pastor and theologian in the Lutheran Church. After the Nazi party came to power in Germany and began putting pressure on churches to promote Nazi ideas, Bonhoeffer fled to America. Eventually, however, he became convinced that he belonged with his people. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, continued to preach Gospel and to oppose Nazi ideas.
I began reading books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer when I was young. I remember, I read the Cost of Discipleship. I have never felt so challenged in my life as I had when I read this book. I had heard about Jesus ever since I was a little boy, but somehow I had never heard the voice of Jesus speaking directly to me—Chad Lewis—as I had through the voice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And after I had heard that voice, I was a different person; I could no longer go back to the way I was before I heard that voice. I could no longer pretend that life offered a whole bunch of choices and that one choice was just as good as the other. Here at last was a 20th century person who took seriously the call of Jesus to follow him. There was only one choice in life—to follow or not to follow Jesus Christ—and it mattered more than anything else. It was at that point that I understood that my life was a journey: I saw my destination, and I saw the road that I needed to travel in order to get there.
Who is your inspiration? In whose footsteps do you aspire to follow? And what story will you leave to those who follow after you?
コメント