Questions: Freedom, Meaning, and Facing Failure

I want to live life well.

And my hope is in the living God, whose will is to teach me how to live well.

Yet, still, it is so difficult.

At college I’m able to just go with the program. There are classes, events, and clubs already established, scheduled, in motion. And so, while I did have some “free time” to figure out what to do with, for the most part my life there is a matter of participating in the larger life of the campus.

Then summer began, I came home, and found myself waiting for my job to start, with weeks and weeks free. There is emptiness, open space. And it is in this emptiness that I can no longer avoid the fundamental life questions I’ve been shoving in drawers and under the bed all year. “What do you want to do with your life?” becomes not a question for the distant future but rather one that is quite explicitly needing to be answered today.

“What do I want to do with my life?

A roadtrip, a denouncing, and Volf.

I found some thought-provoking things this week…

Firstly, Tony Jones goes on a roadtrip with a trucker:

On the other side, a view into the world of those who aren’t so enchanted with the emerging church:

And finally, Miroslav Volf (Of “Exclusion and Embrace” fame) on the relation between church and culture: http://www.npcts.edu/sem/exauditu/papers/volf.html

To draw these three items together, let me just say that I agree with Volf’s approach to the modern / postmodern debate: he critiques both sides. Instead of reducing postmodern thought to simply “the rejection of universal truth” and safely disposing of the caricature, in his writing he engages with philosophers such as Nietzsche and Lyotard and acknowledges both what they get right and where they fall short. Concerning Lyotard, for instance, he states “I am more persuaded by his critique than by his proposal…”