When you strip life down to its core, it doesn’t seem to be all we expect does it? As children we idolize superheroes and princesses, and aspire to a life of world-saving, dragon slaying, and hopeless romancing. Yet it doesn’t take long for the glitter to fade, and eventually we’re all dealt realities cruel hand. We are quick to learn that this world is quite not the place that we as children expected it to be. But is the reality we are given all that different than the reality we hoped would be? Is our world truly empty of the adventures to which we aspired?
Life certainly isn’t fair, but neither is it boring, I think the reality of life just might take a little adjusting to. Part of our internal conflict as people (speaking personally) is entrenched in the fact that while we love adventure and the risk associated with it, yet we also desire stability and safety. Our human desires for excitement and variety are so often held in tension with our desires to be on stable ground, and being the uncompromising people that we are (or for certain that I am) we desire complete adventure to pair with safety…if the risk wasn’t risky it wouldn’t be exciting, but if risk presents certain death it then becomes foolish…finding the balance is quite paradoxical.
While we desire to summit the peaks of this life, we often fear the treacherous routes we must traverse. And while everyone’s “summits” may be different they are summits nonetheless and they are a part of our inner groaning for something beyond what this world has to offer.
It’s interesting as I am going through the process which may be described as “growing up”, how much I realize that life’s greatest adventures are seldom set in the exotic and extreme backdrops that the arts so adequately depict, but rather they are set in a reality far more ordinary, in a locale far simpler. Life’s constructs, for most of us, are built more often in the settings of work and home than they are in sports arenas, royal courts, and glorious battle. Instead of battling Goliath, we are fighting traffic in our morning commutes. Instead of a life driven by of capturing love and beauty, we are flung into jobs and workplaces that on the surface appear to be lacking even a thread of excitement contained in the stories we were read as children.
So what are we to do?
I would pose that the issues is not reality itself, but the way in which we perceive the real reality that we live. Even in life’s banal ordinary conditions are truly some great adventures, we mustn’t lose sight of this fact, for if we do, we will be cast into a plot where we’re nothing more than lemmings living lives devoid of passion, desire, and purpose.
There is a reason that Christ came to this world in humble circumstance, and lived a life that was very truly human. As it is said, Jesus made no compromise of his divinity while on earth, but also no compromise of humanity, he was fully God and fully man. Had Christ come and lived a life simply hovering above the realities of life as a human, how would we be able to follow his model for living? If the God of the universe’s ultimate act of love was to come to reality, shouldn’t we take this into consideration when viewing our own reality?
Through a variety of conversations and introspection, I’ve come to realize that the ordinary can be largely unappealing. However, the model that Christ sets forth is to be deeply extraordinary, while living in the astonishingly ordinary world. When we begin to embrace our lives and our work as embarking on a great adventure for Christ’s sake, the script takes new shape and the stories of our 9 to 5 lives are transformed into an adventure in a brave new world.
For me, I’m realizing all the more that my life is in fact a great adventure; I just need to be reminded of such with frightening regularity. While sometimes my circumstances feel a lot more like an episode of “Leave it to Beaver” than it does a bout with Apollo Creed, I need to remember that humanity and reality were Christ’s great adventure, so why should it not be mine. In embracing reality we may just find that our lives are quite amazing. Instead of romanticizing about all the summits we could be out conquering, we make diligent steps to summit the mountains we’re on.
I feel that a life of extraordinary-ordinariness is quite an aspiration, and I’m trying to be diligent in finding and thriving in all the simple adventures that are in front of me…which is proving to be quite an adventure in and of its self. We have the opportunity for a great reality, we simply must emerge ourselves deeper in it, as opposed to attempting to escape from it.
Embracing Today and all the adventure it brings,
CP
Chrispanoff.blogspot.com
