Ron DeBoer
3/7/2013
“Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name goes all the glory for your unfailing love and faithfulness.” (Psalm 115:1, NLT)
One of my favorite movies when I was a young English teacher in the first half of my life (more on the “first half” versus “second half” of life later in this column) was the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society, starring Robin Williams. In an early scene in the film, Williams’s character, an English teacher named John Keating, asks his class of adolescent boys to look at the young faces from the past in the photos adorning a trophy case. While the students are gazing intently at the photos, recognizing their own youth and idealism, Keating informs them that the boys in the photos lived a hundred years ago and are now all dead. He uses this moment of shock to teach the boys the concept of carpe diem—that they should “seize the day” while they are young and healthy and can make the most out of their lives. He quotes the great American writers—Whitman, Frost, Thoreau—urging his impressionable English students to “suck all the marrow out of life” and “take the road less traveled.”
While this may be good advice in certain contexts, this message of individuality and self-centeredness has sadly come to pervade Western culture. We see it in advertising, on YouTube, and in the movies. Hero worship dominates Twitter, where celebrities and athletes attract millions of followers. Biographies of “self-made” men and women populate the bestseller lists. Despite the decided stall in the economy in the last few years, we still love the idea of the American Dream: young person starts out with nothing, takes risks, defies the odds, perseveres in the face of naysayers, and becomes rich or famous or respected. All by their own doing! A large number of Hollywood movies end with a scene in which the main character, after attaining some success or finishing some journey, receives applause from the throngs of observers.
The older I get, the more deeply I understand that none of what I have been blessed with in life has been by my own doing. In my own personal journey to build my career and reputation, I fell short of what God wanted from me. I’m going to be brutally honest: In my desire to get ahead, I admired and attempted to get close to the rich and influential, and I ignored the poor and weak. I gave myself the firstfruits of my money and time and gave God the leftovers. The dreams I had for my children were very much wrapped up in how they reflected on me. I wanted all the glory. Maybe you can relate.
But what happens when you begin to experience disappointment, dead ends, closed doors, failures, and death? Your children make decisions that shame you. Your career stalls or ends. Suddenly you don’t want to talk about them anymore. You hit the age of invisibility in a culture of beauty and strength. When you can no longer “seize the day,” what then do you seize?
The author of Psalm 115 urges us to give God the glory always, no matter how big the accomplishment, no matter how large the disappointment. It is all God’s. He has a plan for our lives. Our successes are his. All the glory goes to God. He carries our wins and shoulders our defeats, freeing us to be what he intended us to be—his servants, unworried about our high place among men and women. Isn’t that great news?
Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward, advocates for a life that is exactly the opposite of our culture’s idea of a life worth living. He says that for us to get close to God and see the real purpose of life, we must fail, lose everything, and fall hard. It is by falling that we rise. He writes, “The falling becomes the standing. The stumbling becomes the finding. The dying becomes the rising. The raft becomes the shore.” Rohr says that our lives can be divided into the first half and the second half and that these halves are not chronological. Some people never get to the second half of their lives; others get to it on their deathbed; still others learn earlier in life through their failures and disillusionments. The first half of life is the time we spend building our reputations, careers, identities, riches—all the things we deem important. The second half of life commences when all of these self-made desires die away or are lost. It is then that we become truly reborn. We see God’s glory, and we see that all the glory goes to God.
Psalm 115 ends with a blessing that I give you today:
May the Lord richly bless
both you and your children.
May you be blessed by the Lord
who made heaven and earth.
The heavens belong to the Lord,
but he has given the earth to all humanity.
The dead cannot sing praises to the Lord,
for they have gone into the silence of the grave.
But we can praise the Lord
both now and forever! (Psalm 115:14-18, NLT)
Listen to the words of Be Unto Your Name, a song by Robin Mark, that shows how big God is and how small we are.
Ron DeBoer is a writer living near Toronto.
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