Live. Love. Laugh.

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” – John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy”

We often live our lives waiting for the future. We make big dreams. We have desires, the plans for our lives, or at least, the way we want our lives to pan out. “Shoot for the moon,” every high school valedictorian honestly (but unfortunately, so tritely) proses, “for even if you miss, you’ll be among the stars.”

We want to be extraordinary (who wants to be ordinary?). We want to reach our fullest potential, to do things with excellence (which, in Christian circles is usually guilt-tripped into you by some goofy proof-texting like “let all things be done decently and in order” [1 Cor. 14:40] or “make the most of every opportunity because the days are evil” [Eph. 5:16]). We are convinced, like everyone else, God wants to use us for something great; or if this is unachieveable, as one cliché proposes, “If you can’t do great things, do small things in a great way.”

Philosopher Martin Heidegger, was well aware of this phenomenon—not of bad commencement speeches, but of the way the future shapes our lives. To him, the authentic self does not live in the present but in the future. He looks straight into the eyes of death and takes life by the horns and makes something out of it. Each one of us is thrown into a set of possibilities beyond our personal choice or abilities—the “(un)natural lottery” as some thinkers prefer to call it—and it is from this array of future possibilities that we take ownership of who we are.

But human freedom, nonetheless, and as evident as it is, life often tends to take us by the horns. Our dreams are fettered by impossible obstacles—we do not live in an “equal opportunity” world. Our plans are redirected upon some new, unknown trajectory by a decision here, indecision there, indifference in this aspect of our lives, time that passes by too quickly. Singleness. Divorce. A life-changing accident. Cancer. An unplanned pregnancy. “Life comes at you fast,” one commercial reminds us, but no insurance policy can help us regain an understanding of our own (mis)identity amidst the flurry of activity, events, and even mundane routines that make up our fleeting existence.

A different hand is dealt us than we expected. At first, we become disoriented or angry; we blame God and others for this life that becomes our real life. We get frustrated that our short lives are largely composed of the same boring activities: sleeping, eating, practicing personal hygiene, clothing ourselves, sitting in traffic, buying groceries, doing laundry. And when we realize “each man’s life is but a breath. Man is a mere phantom…” (Ps. 39:5-6), we wish to be a cat with nine lives, or we secretly hope reincarnation is actually true so we can come back and do all the things we missed out on in the next time around.

Then, after this bitter pill goes down, we realize a sweetness in its aftertaste. No matter how lame or boring our lifestyle sounds when we tell it to someone else, we find that it is far better than we had ever anticipated.

We find meaning in the squeal of an infant who is squirming while we change his diaper. The local (and by many comparisons, pretty pathetic) restaurant becomes a storehouse of cherished memories. We feel the beauty in the simplicity of our lives, in a brief lunch break with a friend or a drive through the country at dusk on a cool summer day. We enjoy waking up to a kiss even if it includes bad breath.

We relish in the distinct smell of tomato plant on our hands after working in the garden, or a new book freshly unwrapped, or the genuine leather of a baseball glove, or “the smell of a newborn baby’s head” (thanks U2). We enliven our soul with the taste of watermelon on the 4th of July, a cold beer after a hot summer’s day of work, wassail or hot chocolate when frost outlines our windows, and fresh chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven (good anytime).

We find our history by participating in that same cycle of life—birth, school, puberty, more school, marriage, child-rearing, death, and estate taxes—that has been experienced for thousands of generations. Our routine becomes a rhythm, the heartbeat for our life; the hum of the refridgerator, the buzz of the computer with its dying out fan, the ear-piercing alarm clock, the laughter of summer, the fury in insects’ wings who have made their way into the house, the creek of the long-since oiled screen door, and the bodily noises of an infant become the orchestra for the soundtrack of our lives.

We look at all of this and see that it is incredibly more than we could ever ask for or imagine. We taste and see life and declare it is good, no, very good. Life is Beautiful.

“But everything I had to lose
Came back a thousand times in you
And you fill me up with love
Fill me up with love
And you help me stand
'cause I am a family man…
This is not what I was headed for when I began
This was not my plan
It's so much better than” – Andrew Peterson, “Family Man”