Some days our eyes are opened to life beyond the edge of our own immediate existence. Beyond what we know. Beyond what we typically care about.
Some days the weight of the world feels a bit heavier – or maybe it’s that we feel compelled to carry a bit larger portion of the world’s weight than we normally do.
Some days we look around at the world – what it is and what it could be – and we throw our hands up, disgusted by what we see and hear. We think that there is little reason to have hope or to care much at all.
Yet there are other days – days when we are more tender to the ways of seeing and knowing the world as Jesus might – and our jaded edges are soften just enough for us to realize that we are implicated – in how the world is and how it ought to be.
I’ve been reading Visions of Vocation, by Dr. Steven Garber of The Washington Institute. I count him a friend and mentor from a distance – and someone who pushes me to think about the world – and my role within it – in ways that often make me uncomfortable.
Why is it that we care? Why is it that we see ourselves implicated in the world, in the way the world is and isn’t – and in the way it ought to be? And why does it seem that some do not care?
If I’m honest, most days it easier to count myself among those who do not care. It makes my load considerably lighter. It allows me to focus on the things of life that I want to focus on – the things that primarily concern, well, me.
But I don’t believe this is the kind of life we are meant to live. In fact, I believe that (in the words of the band, Switchfoot) “we were meant to live for so much more…” We are meant to live for so much more.
Apart from being horribly plagued by hubris, we do not see ourselves as history might. We live among ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places. We are families and we are neighbors, we worship and we work, we laugh and we cry, we hope and we love – the stuff of life for everyone everywhere. But it’s also true that whether our vocations are as butchers, bakers, or candlestick makers – or people drawn into the worlds of business or law, agriculture or education, architecture or construction, journalism or international development, health care or the arts – in our own different ways we are responsible, for love’s sake, for the way the world is and ought to be. We are called to be common grace for the common good.
Common grace for the common good.
There’s nothing very common about that. And it’s a far cry from expecting grace (or demanding it) for ourselves while we hold the rest of the world to an unrealistic set of standards.
No, there’s nothing common about the kind of life that strives to know the world and still love it.
And best I can tell, it necessitates that we first understand ourselves as implicated in the world – how it is and ought to be.
