You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

to act prodigally is to make decisions based on love, goodness, and beauty rather than efficiency or productivity or profit.

“It is impossible to attempt to engage in leisure for health’s sake. . . . Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end.”

No matter how uncertain, disorienting, and alienating the world may become, we can never be lost.

The burden to be someone, to live life to the fullest, to endlessly iterate and optimize and compete—when we observe these for what they are, it takes some of their power away.

The place we all must begin is with grace for our neighbors and ourselves.

Therefore, we ought to expect that life will remain difficult—inordinately and senselessly difficult.

But the hope Eliot tells his readers to wait without is false hope: a hope that demands results, an impatient hope, a hope that is pragmatic, a hope that rushes to action, a hope that cannot be still and know that God is God.

If I were a better man, more spiritually and intellectually mature, maybe I’d only find comfort in poetry, prayer, contemplation, and walks in nature. Sometimes I do, but this society is brutal and there is no shame in finding joy in simple pleasures that ease the burden we carry, even if those pleasures are “less good.”

Once you accept that contemporary life is inhuman, that God gives us good gifts to comfort us, and that even when there are ideal forms of leisure it is still fine to take pleasure in simple gifts, it ought to humble you and give you grace for your neighbors and yourself.

But if you can get over yourself and stop thinking in terms of efficiency, you can honor God and love your neighbor while having faith that He will set things to right. Don’t let yourself ask, “Is this good deed making any real difference?” If it really is the right thing to do, the efficiency does not matter.

The hard thing is to be still and know that He is God. But that is the only way you can know Him. A holy stillness accepts that God is sovereign and rests in His goodness and grace. It accepts that you cannot save the world or yourself. A holy stillness leads to action, but an action in stillness.

But faithfully doing the good that lies before us while waiting dependent upon God for redemption is the most meaningful action you can take.

whenever we pin our hope to a specific political or social goal, we end up hoping for the wrong thing: a finite human solution.

make a practice of calling out the contemporary anthropology as it appears in your life.

call it what it is. This is an outworking of our contemporary anthropology. It’s a false conception of the human person that assumes that I am my own and am solely responsible for making my life matter. It is a lie. I am not my own but belong to Christ.

You may never see the fruits of your labor in this life, but it doesn’t matter. God did not call you to be successful. He called you to be faithful. However, if you are responsible for your own existence, only tangible, measurable, immediate success can come close to satisfying you. And you will grow increasingly frantic to see your political vision fulfilled, your cause triumph, and increasingly intolerant of failures and of people who disagree with you.

With the second mention of her name, I imagine that Martha’s defenses fell down. Christ spoke to the Martha behind the Martha who believed that she was personally responsible for everything.

We are a people of Marthas, chronically unable to cease our work to delight in Christ. We feel safer when we have exhausted ourselves laboring for our own justification. And the sight of Marys—those who can rest—makes us bitter. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By God’s grace, as we continue to understand that we are not our own, we may begin to learn to rest.

Anthony B. Bradley, Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration: Hope from a Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Bradley’s book is a good example of applying human criteria to matters of justice. As he shows, a personalist approach to justice centers on caring for the good of people rather than seeing them as statistics.