Ministry - Blogs - tangle.com

In a culture that bombards its population with advertisements and ideologies on the seemingly best ways to live...I doubt very much that many of us know who we really are. We're told how to live, what to buy, what we need, what to wear...you know what I mean. And if you're not sure what you're missing, turn the TV on for 5 minutes and they'll tell you. Whether you like it or not there's no separating yourself from the culture in which you live. You become part of it. You march to its beat. Often without even knowing it.


I don't want to march to its beat...or be enslaved to its pressuring ideology. No. I want to be free. To know first what I live for and secondly how to deal with life's most difficult crises. The polarities of life and death. Purpose and meaninglessness. Love and apathy. Intimacy and loneliness. Pleasure and pain. Responsibility and laziness. Generally speaking, (at least from my perspective) we fail to personally grapple with the difficult questions raised by these life provocations.


Instead we defy the negative provocation itself. We fight back. We don't want to think about the sting of death. The emptiness and boredom of living a meaningless and apathetic life. How lonely and painful things can be. Especially relational pain. And for good reason--it hurts! But we can't walk blindly through life pretending such things don't exist. We can't medicate it with our drug of choice. Often provided to us by culture itself. Work. Alcohol. Shopping. Illegal drugs. Hooking up. Legalism. Food. Drugs can't make these life questions go away for too long. They will return. I promise. If each of us fails to answer these questions on our own we'll wake up one day and find ourselves emptier than we were before. Depressed. Lonely. And wondering who we are. Where we fit in the world. And if our lives really matter.


It's time to start answering these questions for yourself. To stop following merely what others are doing and to start leading. I want to march to the beat of a different drummer. No, I want to be the drummer.


But to be the drummer I need to answer these polarities. I need to find my true self. Soren Kierkegaard says we have to start by first placing value and belief in God above all else...that the true self is totally absorbed in God. For Kierkegaard, true self is achieved by way of grappling with the incongruent issues of infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity, and eternity and temporality. For instance, the infinite possibilities of life are never-ending. One can do an endless number of things with his life as he exists. On the other hand, he is also limited and has to deal with his failures and his mortality, all wretched necessities that are a part of one�s existence. Unfortunately, many people lose the audacity to effectively cope and work through the anxiety, choosing to live at one of two polarities. Either they choose to live a life of dreaming about the possibilities or they enslave themselves to the necessities by giving up their dreams. In both cases, the individual has lost his sense of self because he chose to give up his choice and give in to the tension.


I challenge you not to give into the tension. But to instead make a choice. To live differently. Are you the drummer? Or marching with everyone else?


Start here:

Who are you when you're alone?