Between Awareness and Aspiration

Between Awareness and Aspiration

Looking out the kitchen window of our rented house that’s not quite right in at least 17 ways at a dreary neighborhood where crime encroaches and lackluster ambitions, décor, and city planning creep into the cracks of our society, I dream of a better life … but I know it could be worse.

Eating its way in from the back of my mind, stories from my student from Syria – of friends, relatives, cities destroyed by their own government – begin to shade the window through which I view my world.

…Her facebook feed filled with news of savage, rampant darkness…

…Mine flooded with laughing baby videos (my own no less a culprit), cute kitties, and memes of first-world problems… Scattered bits of reference to international drama – lives, planes, human rights lost – buried in my news feed, often overlooked in willed ignorance and fear…

Fear that it could happen here.

Fear that my discontent with life is only the tip of an iceberg of pain – pain I might live vicariously through a thousand tales, or pain that may be coming as our economy and government crumbles and with it our precious standard of living.

And yet I struggle with discontentment, wanting a more perfect life, home, and family; I know that I have it good, that my simple life is relatively extravagant, but because I live in a time and place where it’s feasible to improve on details I catch myself ungrateful for the moment, conspiring for ideal conditions on every front.

To be aware of, and to care about, all that is happening beyond the bubble of our first-world problems, yet still live at peace with one’s self and condition, perfectly content with the things at hand, no matter how imperfect they all may be … I don’t know how these ideals can ever be reconciled in one heart.

I dream still, endlessly, listlessly, of a better place, a real home, family close at hand, yet remain haunted by the silent question – who are you to dream? This “all-American, God-given right to the pursuit of happiness” … I’ve done nothing to deserve it, and don’t really know what to do with it. So many souls flaunt it in the face of international tragedies too large to comprehend, flooding our media (self-chosen news feeds and national news channels alike) with innumerable, irrelevant scraps of knowledge, entertainment, self-improvement …

Would we be better people for giving that all up, for self-inflicted penance from survivor’s guilt? If so, we embrace a ludicrous goal of leveling the playing field to one large, flat, sea-level globe of terror.

Would we be better people to live at peace with ourselves and situation, knowing we are proportionally more lucky than others? If so, who can?

As shackles of poverty, fear, and control fall off, we instinctively reach higher. We aspire to better our lives and selves. The more freedoms we’re granted, the more we want.

Born into a world of freedom,

consciousness deluged with virtual sensational detail of things that mostly don’t matter,

I’m torn

between awareness                      and aspiration

                                                          that weighs me down                      that tauntingly goads me on

Who can be content to simply be?

From one end of the spectrum to the other, the world leaves us hurting and hungry. Whether my vision is set on the problems of other countries, the vanities of our own, the insatiable human appetite to better one’s life, or a gothic self-loathing for undeserved gifts,

I’m looking down.

And I realize the freedom and truth in the words:

                Set your mind on the things which are above, not on the things which are on the earth.¹

                … But as it is, they long after a better country, that is a heavenly one … ²

                For we do not have here a remaining city, but we seek after the one to come.³

Perhaps those who have less trust and fewer possessions in the material realm can arrive ahead of us at this conclusion: we have nothing here on earth worth investing our heart in; the eternal God, the ultimate and infinite source of life, liberty, and happiness itself, is worthy of all our heart, mind, and time and alone will satisfy completely.

Whether we are fleeing from one negative aspect of this world or into a positive, elusive other, the questions persist, and the answer remains: Look up.

                … Looking away unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith …⁴

His presence is my peace.

His salvation is my grounding in a storm of world chaos and inward unrest.

His eternal life, received and enjoyed, can raise me above the problems beyond my scope of knowledge and capacity to bear, the guilt for being ignorant of and as yet unscathed by them, and the hypocritical endless yearning for “more-better-now” when I already have so much. Christ, in His infinite depth and richness, is the reality of the land and the life for which I search.

¹ Colossians 3:2

² Hebrews 11:16

³ Hebrews 13:14

⁴ Hebrews 12:2