Year: 2016

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Even during this season I’m not sure we who call ourselves Christ-followers  give much thought to the profound event that we are about to celebrate, the miracle that exists at the very center of our faith. The Advent on earth of the Universal God in human form is a mystery both blessed and sublime. We are all missing out spiritually if we do not take time now, or at any time of the year for that matter, to ponder the transcendent reality of God becoming a man.

No other religion in the world puts forth the idea of a Supreme Being so willing to identify with His deeply fallen human creation as to literally become one of them. That He would do so out of love because only such an “incarnation” would make possible our rescue from spiritual death becomes for us an incredibly sweet and compelling truth, if we but ponder it for a while. It is mind-boggling, yes, but even though we cannot completely comprehend the full ramifications of our Lord becoming a human being we can apprehend it in such a way as to open a door to one of the deepest blessings we can know in our Christian walk.

Try to meditate for a time on the reality that we belong to a God who so loved us as to become one of us to make that very “belonging” possible. What an indescribable descent must it have been for One who is infinite, eternal and uncaused Being. I once wrote that it is somewhat like a human being becoming a flea to save a world of fleas, but that barely begins to cover the magnitude of the descent we now consider. Along with the Resurrection itself His Advent is the miracle of all earthly ages.

Yet do not only use your intellect in your quest to experience the meaning of Advent, use your heart as well for this is nothing if not “an affair of the heart.” How can our hearts not fall in love with Immanuel, “God with us”? Christmas testifies to the beginning of a new opportunity for human intimacy with God, an intimacy with God as man. How can we remain unmoved by a Holy God, One “Wholly Other” as a German theologian once described his innate separation from us, becoming one of us? Just the fact that the Son of God became also the Son of Man is enough, in my opinion, to make Christianity the most compelling belief system on the planet. No one has a God like ours, no one, and it is Jesus, the God-Man who makes this so.

There is only one thing more compelling than the birth of Christ. That is the reality that the God who arrived on earth as one fully human over two-thousand years ago then proceeded to go to the cross and defeat death for what were now His fellow human beings as well as His creation. Contemplate that as well. He made us but because of Christmas He could also die for us….as one of us.

But then that part of the story is for another holiday (or more accurately another “Holy Day”) a few months from now.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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We are far more likely to do wrong when we are keeping both God and others who truly love us at a distance. When we unhealthily isolate ourselves we do unhealthy things. Our relationship with the Lover and lovers of our soul is the very strength that keeps us from destructive and self-destructive actions. As beings that are designed for relationship it is impossible for this to be otherwise.

Why do we isolate to begin with? Often the answer is found in our desire to avoid pain. Relational pain has many guises. Some of this pain is actually God-ordained and part of our sanctification. This is the pain of the encounter with the holy. Other pain is the result of the evil that dwells in both others and us and it gratifies only the Enemy of our souls. An example of the former is the discomfort that comes from encountering a perfect God in the midst of our own imperfection and knowing the correcting rod of His discipline. An example of the latter is the misery of received abuse, be it physical, emotional or sexual.

Whatever the source and nature of this pain the temptation is to withdraw into the perceived fortress of ourselves. We depart from the company of God and the company of human beings in a vain attempt to escape the agents of our hurt. This is the result of our continuing inclination towards evil. No one who has reached heaven and been purified of all sin desires anything but perfect intimacy with God and those who share in His paradise. It is only our ingrained desire for autonomy and safety on our own terms, combined with the continued difficulty of living in a profoundly fallen world that causes us to flee from divine and human company.

When we choose to run from relational pain we cut ourselves off from the very answer to human evil, love. No one can love or be loved in isolation. This may appear obvious since love, of course, implies relationships. However this apparently self-evident reality sometimes eludes us, especially when some of  the love we have experienced in this life seems imperfect at best and damaging at worst. At times we think we’d be better off alone than involved in something that feels less like love and more like rejection or neglect.

Yet real love exists. God’s love for us is perfect. Human love is not but it still exists, is divinely rooted, and is indispensable to our well-being. Without both kinds of love we have no motivation to resist sin and the Devil (a “loner” if there ever was one) takes full advantage of its lack. Temptation is defused by the experiencing of healthy relationships. It is amplified by isolation.

It is imperative that, despite its challenges, we who call ourselves Christians persist in the pursuit of deep connection with God and with fellow human beings. The quest for intimacy in our earthly life is sometimes difficult, but it is not optional. Without it we become increasingly given over to evil, and thereby to death. Since sin thrives in the absence of love, love must be our refuge…and love requires nearness to an object other than ourselves.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Perfect love casts out fear, not perfect doctrine. Today there are some prominent evangelicals who appear to give the impression that having a watertight, systematic theology is the most important task of every true believer. For them security is found in crossing every “t” and dotting every “i” in the interpretation of Scripture. While it is no doubt true that belief in biblical inerrancy requires us to seek and hold onto sound doctrine our creeds do not save us, Jesus Christ does.

Cognitive, propositional approaches to the faith have their place. We are to love the Lord our God with, among other things, our minds. A Christianity that has little regard for the truths of the Bible can hardly be called Christianity at all. The relativism of our age surely has invaded the Church and to ignore this fact is to risk becoming salt that has lost its proverbial saltiness. This having been said right doctrine is still a terrible substitute for right relationship if right doctrine is all you have.

Relationship is at the core of true religion. The Pharisees had the law but they had no relationship with the God of that law. The heart of Christianity is found in the reality that God was willing to go to an incredibly great length to make it possible to once again be in deep communion with His finest creation. Joy at the prospect of the restoration of the human race to God’s family was one of the things that helped Jesus to endure the physical and spiritual trauma of the cross.

There are many hindrances to God’s desire for that restoration to be realized. Sin takes multiple forms; some are obvious, some less so. One of the latter more subtle forms of sin might be called “doctrinolatry”. It can be defined as a focus on doctrine so extreme and dogmatic that knowing right doctrine subtly becomes more important than knowing Christ. People who fall into this error lose the joy of their salvation because they lose their first love. They reject the primacy of knowing and loving God for the false comfort of a system of thought which seeks to put Him in a box they themselves may have designed. In doing so they reject mystery for a presumptuous intellectual mastery and, without even knowing it, thwart the Spirit’s work in their hearts. In some extreme cases it may even prevent someone from truly coming to know Christ at all.

Lovers do not analyze and tabulate one another. They experientially know and deeply enjoy each other. Lovers do not spend too much time reading about the structure of relationships at the expense of actually having one. For true believers this may seem like stating the obvious but when it comes to the ultimate Lover, the Lover of our souls, we often forget that our relationship with Him is the greatest love affair in the universe!

By all means study Scripture and examine what it says in order to understand that which God gives us to understand about ultimate reality. By all means study sound Christian works of theology through the centuries. But in doing so never forget that it is the God behind those Scriptures and that sound theology we need to know and love first and foremost, not our finite intellectual interpretation of that God.

 

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

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“No doctrine…. seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result when you go away from the debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the reality–from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.”

-C.S. Lewis

It is easier to defend Christianity than to embody it. It is easier to defend the principles and doctrines of Christianity than to live them out in the Spirit by which they were meant to be lived. As a believer who finds himself trying to do both these things, I have personally come to better understand recently what Lewis is saying here. I would add to his thesis that a prideful anger can also be manifest in “Defending the Faith,” which makes the most eloquent argument do more harm than good to both the one giving it and the one hearing it.

After 26 years as a hopefully earnest follower of Christ, I find my mental faculties undiminished in my efforts to communicate the truth of what I believe. In fact, logically enough, I may be more intellectually “proficient” as an apologist for my faith now than at any other time that came before. Usually an observant Biblical Christian does gain more “head-knowledge” as the years go by. Unfortunately, what may not be simultaneously gained is a deeper practical devotion to God which manifests itself in the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Many of these fruits have eluded me, even a quarter century after my conversion, and I find the most concerning reality to be the fact that having any of them depends on what is really the most important “fruit.” The one in question is a deep personal knowledge of and love for God rooted in true dependence on His Holy Spirit.

This lack of felt closeness to the One I call my Lord has been a concern throughout my Christian life. I will not go deeply into the reasons I think the problem exists for me. I suspect that many of you who are reading this can relate to the problem yourselves, and you may already be quite familiar with some of those reasons. They range from grappling with the many distractions of the age we live in to unconquered indulgence in various sins to fears about what might actually happen if I truly did die to myself in order to live for Christ.

But for the purposes of this essay what I would prefer to specifically focus on is the effect this condition can have on my outward witness. Believers are called to “tell the truth in love.” This is virtually impossible to accomplish if we are not living deeply and experientially in the love of God. We may tell someone why to believe in Jesus with great eloquence and impeccable argument, but if they do not simultaneously sense that we truly love them as a human being made in the image of God, as a precious individual for whom our Lord died, then we are doing them no good!

To the degree I am not communicating love to the person I am telling about Christ, my witness is compromised, often fatally I suspect. I have found, to my shame, that I sometimes find myself witnessing in an angry way, and that the anger is often the result of my own sinful pride. I can be defensive because of my concern over being rejected. I can be sharp with someone because of my own frustration at not being able to “make them see” the truth of the Gospel. In both cases the “witness” becomes more about me than about loving someone into the Kingdom of God.

The answer to my problem circles back to Lewis’s quote. I tend to believe that most of our challenges in truly going deeper into the Christian life are, as he implies, simply a matter of relying on ourselves rather than the One who created and redeemed us. Anger, pride, defensiveness: all these are symptoms of relying on my fallen human nature, my “flesh,” rather than relying moment by moment on the presence and power of Christ in my life.

I still am not sure how to be that reliant and therein lay my challenge. I need to decrease and He needs to increase. Until that happens to a far greater extent than it has in my life thus far I will not be able to help others to the degree I both need and want to help them. Perhaps the most important thing I can do is simply to seek God to a greater degree than I have in the past, though that is always easier to propose than to actually do.

Fortunately, as Jesus Himself said, “with God all things are possible.”

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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“Service” is a dirty word for some of us. We hear it and immediately react in a negative way. This is most often for two reasons.

The first is because in our past people about whom we cared and/or upon whom we were dependent granted us love that was, to whatever degree, conditional. They would love us fully only if we did something that benefited them in some way. This is the very definition of conditional love. Receiving it is contingent on us, not on the other person. Many of us have been victims of this love that really is not love at all and its result is a sense that we have to earn the love we need through serving others.

The second reason has nothing to do with being a victim. It is a function of our own inherent inclination to make self-centered decisions. The degree to which our nature is fallen is perhaps best manifested by this tendency. We are selfish. The one we most want to serve is the one looking back at us in the mirror. Even as Christians the idea of service is often either not present or it is present but tainted by the underlying desire to serve for our own gain.

These two motivations are always present to some degree in our hearts. Both must be overcome if we hope to be freed from a caricature of servant-mindedness in order to embrace the kind of good and true servant-mindedness embodied by Jesus Christ.

The Son of God was and is the true Servant. He also helps others for two reasons, but for two very different ones. Jesus serves us because He knows and loves His Father and is known and loved by His Father. Both these loves are perfect, and thus real and unconditional. Jesus is one with the Father and the Father is the only being in the universe whose love is inexhaustible. He does not need us to love Him. Unlike human beings He is self-sufficient in every way and therefore He does not love us to gain something from us like those in our past. He also is not self-centered as we are. He is other-centered by divine nature.

Jesus has been described as “a Man for others”. This is because, being one with the Father, He perfectly reflects His Father’s heart. Our Lord loves us because he genuinely has our best interests in heart. He is overflowing with infinite love and He desires to serve us because it brings Him joy to bless the only creation He has made in His own image. There is no ulterior, self-centered motive. God is not capable of deceit and He is not needful of anything we could possibly give Him. This completely eliminates ulterior and self-centered motives. He loves and serves us only because He wants to.

So then how do we, as biblical Christians, come to serve like God does? We can only do so by choosing to identify ourselves with the One who embodies Him in human form and to whom we now belong. As we choose to draw near to Jesus and sit, like Mary, at His feet. We will begin to reflect His nature. Then we will naturally act according to this new nature. Now, when we metaphorically look in the mirror, we will begin to see not our old self but the image of Christ. Part of this transformation will include the dawning of a new desire to serve others, a desire that is based on a real love for people and a humble and sincere desire to seek their good, the same motivation that moves the One we are emulating by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Then the word “service” will take on a new and blessed meaning, one which we will truly desire to embrace and live out.

 

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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God sometimes gives us what we pray for at a different time and in a different way than we asked. This may be because His plan for our lives is bigger than we can imagine and the request is right in spirit but wrong in detail.

With the exceptions of purely selfish or vindictive petitions the child of God can expect that his or her prayer will be answered and often in the affirmative. God is not generally in the habit of forever denying His own that for which they ask. If what they want is a good thing requested in the right spirit, with authentic faith that he can and will grant it to them, then they can live expecting a positive answer. What Christians should not expect is that they will necessarily get the thing they desire in the time and way that seems right to them. In fact, more often than not, the prayer will not be answered in the manner anticipated.

Most of us have heard stories about such unexpected answers. One of the more common tales is that of the person who has sought after God for a mate, thought they had been led to the love of their lives, and then watched the potential relationship crash and burn. After much grieving, possibly accompanied by a period of anger with God that He doesn’t deserve, the person finally comes to accept what has happened and moves on. Shortly thereafter they meet someone even better for them and eventually marry that person. Their prayer was answered, but not when, or with whom, they expected. This story could apply to many other circumstances including asking for a new job, a new place to live, even a call to life ministry. In each case the petitioner might not get what they want when they want it but they will get what God knows is best for them when He knows its best for them to get it. Answered prayer not answered in the way we expect it to be is part of the normal Christian life.

God’s overall plan for our lives is seldom what we expect. He has a wonderful way of taking us in directions we could never have imagined and fulfilling us in a far deeper way than we thought possible. Ask a seasoned Christian whether they have ended up with the kind of life that they expected at the time of their conversion and I would venture to say that very few, if any, would answer yes. We have a tendency to dream small dreams. We also have a tendency to expect that our human perspective on what the future might hold is synchronized with God’s greater plan for us. It seldom is. Our Lord often takes us in directions we never would have expected. This is because he knows us better than we think we know ourselves and also because He knows what we are capable of as we allow the Holy Spirit to take possession of our lives. A Spirit-led life is a life of sometimes astonishing twists and turns. It is an abundant life and one that is potentially full of adventures we would once never had seen ourselves taking part in. The truly committed Christian will encounter many “divine surprises” along the way. At the end such a person will look back with great satisfaction on a life that has reached its potential.

There is perhaps nothing greater than that for us except, of course, the expectation of being with our Lord once such a life here reaches its end.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

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When we who bear the name of Christ sometimes feel particularly miserable in this life, we often come up with one of two reasons to explain why we feel that way. They are

1. Since we are doing some great work for the Lord we must be under satanic attack, either directly or through other people

2.   We are guilty of some great unrepented sin.

I would like to propose a third reason.

3. We are living in a fallen world, and life here is often hard completely apart from whether we are, at the moment, acting like a “saint” or a “sinner.”

The first sentence in M. Scott Peck’s famous book The Road less Travelled is, “Life is difficult.” Whatever one might think of the rest of Peck’s thoughts on the trials of human existence, this first statement absolutely rings true. Life is difficult for all, and that includes believers. We have no immunity from being touched by the same tragedies that affect all of humanity. The trials and tribulations of being human come to all of us. Life is often hard, and sometimes it is so hard as to leave us in a state of misery. I’ve known enough sincere but miserable Christians in my day to know that we are not immune. In fact I know it from my own life experience.

The big question we cannot seem to avoid asking, at least from time to time, is “why?” We want to know why things have to be the way they sometimes are, and one of the obvious places we go to find an answer as followers of Christ is the Bible. As we read through the Word of God, we can easily find examples of people who are going through a time of trouble for the first two reasons.

From the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament to the apostle Paul in the New, we encounter great men of God who deal with all kinds of adversity simply because they are carrying out God’s redemptive will in a world of people who are not only not interested in the redemption He offers but openly hostile to it. We then compare this to the oppression we may have seen in some of our more spiritually productive contemporaries and decide that our own life ministry has drawn the attention of the Enemy of our souls. This is, no doubt, sometimes the case.

We also find plenty of human beings in the Bible who have brought misery upon themselves because of the wrong they have committed. The disobedient and divinely disowned King Saul is one good example and, on a metaphorical level, so is the “prodigal son” of the Gospels, though his ending is happier. Again we read about those who suffered for their sins, and note some we know today who have sinned mightily and paid the price in some form of enduring pain. (We might even note the appearance of such an unfortunate soul while looking in the mirror.) Unrepented sin can certainly be the catalyst for great pain; in fact, even sin for which we have truly repented can still leave us in the unpleasant position of reaping what we once sowed.

However, if we search the Scriptures we will eventually encounter the story of one particular blind man among the several whom Jesus heals. On this occasion the disciples ask their Master the question of who sinned so that this person was born sightless. Was it the man himself or his parents? Jesus replies that none of these “likely suspects” committed a sin that caused this person’s condition. It actually happened so that God’s glory would be displayed…. and then He gives the man his sight.

So just in the light of this one episode, it is safe to say that part of our burden in life is just the result of living in a fallen world as generally fallen people. Perhaps even more importantly we can also say that trouble which comes upon us for this reason can be turned to our gain while simultaneously glorifying our God. The wonderful thing is the fact that this applies to the other causes too. Whatever the reason for our pain, we have a Savior who can use that pain to our ultimate eternal good if we continue to trust Him in the midst of it. Maybe we would do well not to be as concerned with how our misery comes about as much as how God is going to, in His time, bring the best for us out of it.

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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At times it is difficult to trust that God’s grace continues to be present in our lives. This is especially true if our past experiences have been full of pain caused by the conditional love that is so common among human beings. This pain, along with an awareness of the scarcity that defines our fallen world, can make us think in terms of grace being a finite commodity rather than an infinite, inexhaustible gift.

When self-condemnation has a grip upon our souls it seems quite possible to believe that God is only so willing to put up with the darkness which we sometimes perceive within ourselves. At such times it seems unimaginable that the divine forbearance made manifest by grace will be sufficient to cover the evil that seems to remain in our lives. “Surely God has had enough of me”, we think. “What if I have pushed Him past the limits of His patience?”

However God’s mercy extends far beyond what a sin-haunted, struggling believer in the midst of a “dark night of the soul” experience tends to think it can.

Grace has been theologically defined as “unmerited favor.” By such a definition it cannot be earned. If grace cannot be earned then it is reasonable to believe that it cannot be spent either. The very word “spent” implies the finite and is not applicable to something that is inexhaustible. Perhaps we can reject this gift of God─ but this would be grace spurned, not grace exhausted. Compared to the potentially exhaustible love of fellow imperfect people in our lives, divine love is limitless. It never runs out. Think of it this way: God is love and God is infinite. Therefore His love must be as He is─ infinite. This reality is one of the cornerstones of the Gospel; in putting our faith in Christ we gain access to the Father’s unending love. In sanctification His love works to progressively perfect us. At the time of our home-going, or at the return of our Lord, this same love will definitively finish that work.

We who have a proclivity for self-effort (and its resulting self-punishment) often draw lines in the sand for ourselves. We believe that if these lines are crossed, God may no longer love us and grace will be withdrawn from our lives because we’ve “sinned it away.” The exact nature of the crossed lines in question varies, but they always involve some sin that we see as particularly heinous, particularly persistent, or both. If any such self-made line is breached, we are tempted to presume that God has no choice but to stop loving the one who sins so horribly. Surely, at this point, the God who so clearly hates sin must begin to hate us?

Remember, though, that the question at issue is whether or not divine love can be used up, not whether it can be refused. Besetting sin is one thing, apostasy is another. Theologians may argue that a person who calls himself a believer but then deliberately and finally renounces Jesus Christ effectively refuses the ongoing grace of God. But does this mean that God never loved him? Does it mean that He doesn’t continue to love him, even now when that love is destined to be unrequited? If God unconditionally loves a human being how can He be made to hate that person? His love, after all, does not depend upon us but upon Himself.

In Christ God has made it clear that He hates the sin but not, by some kind of divine necessity, the sinner. We are loved despite our sin. Once we repent of our unbelief, and trust in the saving work of the Son of God, the Father’s inexhaustible grace is brought to bear on and in us. As long as we truly want His grace, it is available for us.

The wonderful thing about God’s grace is that the very desire for, and receiving of, that grace can keep us alive in its continual flow and continuing to want more….both now and forever.

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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In our Post-Modern era it has become fashionable for certain segments of the American Church to denigrate the use of reason as an important part of living the authentic Christian life. Some voices in the “Emergent” movement have opined that Evangelical Protestantism has too long been captive to the Enlightenment’s idolatrous elevation of human rationality during the 17th and 18^th Centuries. The theory is that the Church has been unwittingly co-opted by the basically secular worldview expressed in Modernity. In reaction to this, a greater emphasis on emotion is sometimes promoted as a vital corrective. One might say that systematic theology is out and “The Sacred Romance” is in. We are now being advised in certain quarters to think less about God’s order so that we can be free to feel more of His Presence.

No doubt some of this corrective is right on target. Dry intellectualism obsessed only with “right doctrine” is not conducive to the holistic experience of God in all aspects of our being that He Himself desires us to know. The placement of reason above emotion has too often been worn as a sort of badge of biblical legitimacy in the Evangelical world; sometimes to the point of demonizing denominations that endorse emotional experience as a legitimate aspect of worship. We truly have suffered from the larger culture’s captivity to Scientific Modernism. Too often contemporary Christians been subtly assimilated into secularism’s blind faith in the ability of human reason to capture all truth, including theological truth. It is not wrong to acknowledge the need for emotional passion in the pursuit of a God who shows abundant evidence in Scripture of being emotionally passionate Himself. Our hearts must connect with our Lord just as surely as our minds.

That said it benefits us to remember that human reason, even fallen human reason is derived from a God of order as well as passion. Myriad signs of a divine moral and natural order produced by supremely rational thought are no less present in the Bible than signs of divine passion. Reminders of this aspect of God’s character exist all around us. The realms of mathematics, physics and astronomy (to name just a few) eloquently speak of logical intelligent design. In fact all of the applied sciences that gave rise to the astounding technologies we denizens of the 21^st Century take for granted today are based on utilizing the rationally consistent natural order our Lord ordained in the physical universe. If God were a God only of chaotic passion, emotional or otherwise, we would not experience the fixed day to day realities that allow us to “subdue the earth” as Scripture commands. The natural laws of the universe are the product of a Rational Mind and it is their utilization by our derivative created minds that has given us legitimate, if limited, power over creation.

There is nothing wrong with restoring feelings and emotions to their rightful place in the Christian life. Jesus Christ was no Stoic, no pure Rationalist with the world-view of Star Trek’s logic-obsessed Mr. Spock. The Son of God embodied both reason and passion in perfect measure. His followers should not be afraid of experiencing either aspect of the divine nature, insofar as they do not make an idol of either.

The famous polymath and convert to Christianity Blaise Pascal once said that “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” Although this is indeed a true statement, the human mind has reasons of which reason does know something. Such reason should not be rejected simply because the Post-Modern Church is reacting against an earlier philosophical extreme. As is most often the case the truth lies in balance. The best thing the Church as a whole can do today is seek such a balance between reason and emotion while respecting the God-given value of both.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

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They say that no two snowflakes have ever been alike. The same may be said of human beings. However our uniqueness is not where the comparison ends. Snowflakes also have two other qualities that we share; neither being as attractive to the 21^st century American mind as the first one.

Snowflakes are obviously quite numerous and they are also quite short-lived. While people are perhaps not as numerous on the planet we still number in the billions. While people live far longer than snowflakes what is 80 some odd years in the face of thousands of years or, for that matter, in the face of eternity?

We are a society that has put a huge premium on human individuality during this period in our history. We are constantly told by the cultural metanarrative of the Post-Modern West that we are unique and therefore intrinsically of incredibly value. The radical individualism of our time is intimately connected to our race’s universal bent towards pride and self-centeredness. To live for God and for others, in that order, before ourselves is increasingly seen as heresy in the secular world today. It sometimes seems like the only remaining virtue that the majority of people can agree on is a lifetime search for self-fulfillment on their own terms. It is assumed by many today that this brand of self-fulfillment is an absolute human need. One of the things that this is driven by, at least partially, is the supposed necessity to prove how unique and original we are versus everyone else.

While it is a fact that our Creator created us all with a certain degree of uniqueness like the snowflake he also made us very much alike in other ways and in those common aspects of our humanity He desired that we would identify with and support each other. Making our vaunted individuality so primary to what we consider to be “the pursuit of happiness” has cost us something far more truly primary: our ability to put ourselves in a secondary position to the deeper need for authentic community and healthy interdependence. Both of these needs seem to be increasingly ignored by many Americans. This is dangerous because a nation of iconoclasts eventually ceases to be a nation at all.

More importantly it also creates a breeding ground for the kind of pernicious pride that keeps us from the deepest need of all, to love with all our heart, soul, mind and strength the One who created us. Two things can help us to move away from our obsession with self-centered individualism and towards love of God and love of neighbor. They, too, are found in the snowflake comparison. These two things are as follows: we are each just one of billions of our kind and we are all only on this earth for a short time.

When we think of ourselves as being just one among billions of human beings it might help us to put our existence in its proper perspective. We may be unique but we are also, in a sense, quite common in this world. We may be unique but we are also surrounded by multitudes of our kind, each of whom has not only their own uniqueness but also their own commonality with the rest of the human race. We also equally share the same dependence on God and interdependence with each other, whether we know it yet or not.

As for the brevity of our lives most people in this time and place in history do their level best not to think about this reality at all. In our feverish quest for self-fulfillment as unique individuals we tend to forget that all of what we attempt to do, at least in and of ourselves, for others to recognize will begin to vanish in their memory upon our deaths. More importantly what we truly have “made of ourselves” here will be primary to how we will be evaluated hereafter by a God who values what we have done with His Son infinitely (and eternally) more than how we have strived to be different from other human beings just for the sake of the difference.

When a snowflake melts its moment of earthly uniqueness is lost forever and it ceases to exist. This is where the analogy breaks down for we will exist forever somewhere. Where that will be is not determined by our individuality but by whether we have made of it an idol, something that keeps us from putting God first. In the end what does it profit us to be unique but lost?