Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

by N.D. Wilson

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.

For years, all we do is feed. We don’t control what our parents feed us for dinner, we don’t control what they read to us (or don’t read to us) or what they let us watch. We are like jars of wet clay, and we are loaded full with every kind of tale—films; books; TV shows; stories from friends, parents, grandparents. And as we dry, we take the shape of what has been dumped inside of us.

Christianity is no good at all as an idea. Stop thinking that an asserted proposition is the same thing as faith. It’s a start. But it can also be a costume. Enflesh it.

If you think it, live it. If you don’t live it, you don’t really think it. You are not what you think (or what you think you think). You are not what you say you are. You are what you do. You are Adam, charged to name yourself. But you cannot do it with words made noise—only with words made flesh.

The fall of man did not introduce evil; it placed us on the wrong side of it, under its rule, needing rescue. And God is not an aura ruling auras. His Son has flesh even now. You have flesh. This story is concrete, it is for real, and it is played for keeps.

My wife and I tend to overgift to our kids at Christmas. We laugh and feel foolish when a kid is so distracted with one toy that we must force them into opening the next, or when something grand goes completely unnoticed in a corner. How consumerist, right? How crassly American. How like God. We are all that overwhelmed kid, not even noticing our heartbeats, not even noticing our breathing, not even noticing that our fingertips can feel and pick things up, that pie smells like pie and that our hangnails heal and that honey-crisp apples are real and that dogs wag their tails and that awe perpetually awaits us in the sky. The real yearning, the solomonic state of mind, is caused by too much gift, by too many things to love in too short a time.

Because the more we are given, the more we feel the loss as we are all made poor and sent back to our dust. Oh, but we notice heartbeats when they stop. And we beg for more. If we are capable of sulking about Christmas while still around the tree half-buried in shiny paper (and we are), then of course we are capable of weeping when Christmas appears to be over. The ungrateful always farm bitterness in their hearts. Those with faith (yet another gift) rejoice even at the end and after. They wipe tears, more profoundly feeling the full wealth of lives given when those same lives are lost.

Time strips us. Time keeps us from turning into mini-dragons, hunkering down on our piles of whatever we use to give ourselves some sense of worth. And when we go dragonish anyway, time knocks us off, and sends moths and rust and destroyers after our stuff.

In the ancient myths, Tartarus is where the rebel Titans were tortured forever, where they struggled to complete tasks with any end, without any completion. Without death, without mortal time, this earth would be Tartarus. Mortality is a consequence of sin. But it is also a gift. A mercy. A kindness. Death is grace.

Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.

here. You? How many could have? As the earth screams through space, balanced exactly on the edge of everyone burning alive and everyone freezing solid, as we shriek through deadly obstacle courses of meteor

showers and find them picturesque, as the nearest fiery star vomits eruptions hundreds of times bigger that our wee planet (giving chipper local weathermen northern lights to chatter about), as a giant reflective rock glides around us slopping the seas (and never falls down), and as we ride in our machines, darting past fools and drunks and texting teenagers, how many times do we thank God? We are always in His hands, but we often feel like we are in our own. We can’t thank Him for every breath and every heartbeat, but we can thank Him every day for not splatting us with the moon or letting us drop into the sun.