Reclaiming Our Humanity
Reclaiming Our Humanity
“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” – Robin Williams
We live in an adversarial world. It is full of pitfalls, perils, and predicaments. One of the things that history has taught us is that an isolated human being is an easy target for the world to defeat. But whether we rely on higher wisdom (like the threefold-chord idea) or an idiomatic perspective (like there is strength in numbers), we have come to know that the battles we face every day are easier to handle when we are not alone. As we experience the world around us, we need to engage our other passengers on the Good Ship Earth with the hope we can share, rather than as just another adversary on the battlefield, an irrelevant detail to dismiss, or as someone in the way of our busy schedule.
The oddity that exists in the 21st century is that we speak more about connection today than we ever have before, and yet we have more people who feel more disconnected, discouraged, alone, isolated, confused, depressed, suicidal, and demolished by anxiety than at any other time in human history. That’s not hyperbole, but a reality of an ideologically engaged populace that has centered all experiences around the self, while minimizing the fallout that comes from engaging the world around us from that perch. As subjective realities and self-centric perspectives have become more prevalent, personal values have usurped community, cultivating narcissism, ego-driven leadership, and judging others from the tower of our bias or the echo chamber of our tribe. We are keenly aware of how others treat us, even when we may not pay that close attention to how we treat others. We justify our own circumstances (and responses to them) without considering the consequences for others to bear. We assert our will for the good of our purpose (sometimes beyond the limits of our stress, ability, resources, and capacity). We are a leveraged society of individuals, hiding our emotions, managing our fears, and spreading ourselves thinner and thinner across a fragile landscape that we can barely hold together.
Robin Williams’ assertion of “everyone” is the all-inclusive reality. As we leverage ourselves to the hilt, we are all living lives in duress. It’s in our entertainment, our technology, our neighborhoods, our schools, our workplaces, and in our relationships. More than just the pace of busyness in our daily schedules, we are overflowing the cup of anxiety through the algorithm of our lives, the constant marketing of the relevant, and the trafficking of our attention.
Ask someone in the 21st century how their week is going, and nine times out of ten their response will be one word: Busy. We are busy at work, busy at play, busy at home, with our kids, and across our experience. We are busy building the future, busy living through today, and busy cultivating our image, influence, or legacy. It paints a picture that leaves little room to stand back and enjoy what all the busyness has acquired. It’s a reality that keeps us up at night, thinking about details, demands, and deadlines. In a world where performative culture calls us to leverage our human capital to its utmost, manage our energy beyond what our caffeinated intake can handle, and put forth an image where all the balls are easily in the air (with reserves to take on more); we are consistently “on” for the sake of a world that cares little for time, our wellbeing, or the pressure that weighs on us. As long as we are busy, we are fulfilling the moral imperative.
Rick Warren talks about time as our most precious gift, simply because of the limitation that it provides, and the value that can never be regained. When that gift is spent primarily on the self, we limit our impact to what only goes as far as we can reach. The bottom line is that our lives were meant for something bigger than ourselves; an impact that proves the importance of our investment through the transformation in people that we cultivate. In a time when we boast about our connection, but experience little of it, we have to understand that words without action are as worthless as a life whose purpose is the elevation of self at the cost of the world around them. It’s a hard reality, but it is one we need to understand to reach the future we are trying so hard to build.
The Good of Our Own Purpose
Somewhere in my mid-twenties, I came face-to-face with the reality that my understanding of caring for people was very different than reality. I had grown accustomed to the idea that “being right” gave me a special purview to correct others. Of course, my understanding of right was full of personal insights into things that I felt were more true than others. Subjective reality reared its ugly head in my experience. This came to a head after I took a principled stand for something that didn’t need a line drawn in the sand. In response to my
assertion of the benefit to others in my stand, my closest friend leveled truth toward me that transformed me. His words were simple: “You don’t love people! I don’t even think you like them.”
This (of course) was a shock to me, as I saw myself in the business of helping people, building relationships, being/keeping others accountable, and growing community. While I knew that I was focused at times on correcting others, I was doing it out of a general love and an idea that I was helping them. As I have learned many times over since then — God never gave anyone the ministry of criticism. I was a resounding gong. It was all noise. No real value, impact, or benefit; I was the picture of someone who engages the world for the good of their own purpose, thinking of it as something greater than it could ever be.
When I look at the world we live in today, I see the same spirit that I found in myself all of those years ago. We do an awful lot of high-minded things at the cost of others. We seek a great number of goods according to our own purpose, validated by the significance we provide for ourselves. Between the self-centric values of culture and the ambition of influence that dominates our digital experience, we see this reality in the many people living disconnected from real impact for the sake of personal assertion and acquisition. We engage the world around us through our main character energy, and lose the understanding that we are not really at the center of all things.
With the proliferation of technology, a great amount of that effort is amplified and accelerated to reach the masses in ways that previous generations have never known. Things like social media allow us to curate reality, live in an echo chamber, and pretend the constant stream of bespoke marketing is the world as it truly is. When someone calls this broken reality an illusion, many choose to live under its sway rather than be transformed into a new kind of life. They end relationships over it, they ostracize family members, and they reject others for the sake of their subjective reality.
Recently, there have been subtle clues that more and more people are growing weary of subjective reality and are looking for stability in what counts for truth, beauty, and goodness. The culture of self stands on one side, looking to superpower itself through AI, transhumanism, and global influence. But a growing contingent of people are questioning a truth built on deception, beauty crafted from perspective, and goodness architected through a purpose for humans that leaves humanity behind. We see it in HR practice that dices up human capital without empathy. We hear it in political partisanship that elevates personal right over human existence. We find it in educational practices that dictate social theory over human health. We even experience it in churches that build their own kingdoms, rather than invest in people God has given them. The human factor of what we do weighs more heavily than what the public space wishes to speak to.
The truth is that our world doesn’t love people; it uses them. Our culture doesn’t love people; it leverages them to the good of its own purpose. Our leaders don’t love people; they seek to control them. The masses are waking up to these kinds of realities and asking for something different. After all, what good is the purpose of something or someone that ultimately leads to a future where humanity resembles something less than what we were created to be? We were truly made for something more. How can we go forward in a way that promotes our flourishing rather than our demise?
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
The Apostle Paul states something revolutionary in his letter to the Ephesians. He tells us that our battle is not against the other humans we experience in the world around us, and it is not against the physical world in which we live. The real battle is an unseen battle, going on in the spiritual level of our existence. The fight is against principalities, powers, purposes, attitudes, values, and motivations. It is not just an intellectual battle for reason and logic; it is a fight for love, for truth, for a peace that can transcend understanding, and for our very souls.
In the 21st century, the materialist perspective tries to erode any value in the metaphysical aspect of our lives. If it can’t be seen, tasted, or touched, it is relegated to the ignorant superstition of those who want to evade reality. But the truth of our existence is that we live in a world that was created for one purpose: human flourishing. The world wasn’t made for technological advancement, consumer acquisition, financial independence, personal accolades, or the good of our own purposes. When we understand our true purpose, we can see that the world was created for the image-bearers of the Almighty to live in, to have dominion over, to steward, and to live with one another in community with their Creator.
This is reality as it truly is. We were created for more in a human context. Unfortunately, we fell from that grace and have been sent off in 8 billion directions through our autonomy, our own wisdom, and the purposes of our hearts. When we try to make the rubber hit the road in our human purpose, we are lost for the right direction without the leading of the Almighty. We live in a world where everyone is fighting a battle; daily, weekly, and sometimes, minute by minute. In a lonely world of isolation, the masses are trying to find any purpose they can align with to make sense out of their experience.
That is hard in a world that is seeing less and less value in the humans that inhabit it. The world tells us that we are insignificant and the random outcomes of an explosion of matter. A house of cards has been built to convince us of any reality beyond the truth that the only place to find purpose as a human is in the Almighty, where you deny yourself and replace the good of your purpose with the good of His purpose. That deception has people chasing billionaires, influencers, power-brokers, and gurus; anything or anyone that will help you fulfill your own destiny for your own glory. Is it any wonder why there is such a heavy push in our world to minimize human fallout, human value, and human community for a future that needs fewer and fewer humans?
God’s economy is much different. He told our first parents to be fruitful and multiply; fill the Good Ship Earth with as many passengers as possible so that His image-bearers would thrive in the creation He made for them. In fact, He found humans to be so valuable that even after they failed, He came and sacrificed Himself so that we could be reconciled back to the level of flourishing that He intended for us. He calls us to find that reality in Him and engage the world around us in a way that restores it to His purpose. If you are fighting battles alone, if the weight of anti-human efforts is causing you to sink into isolation, frustration, and despair, He calls us to cast those burdens on Him and let Him give us rest. If you are looking for that kind of transformation from where you are today, click here to find out more about what that entails.
Our time here is limited, and once it is gone, we can never get it back. Use what time you have to be transformed and cultivate transformation in the world that lives around you. Take that adversarial world, and meet the battle of principalities and powers with the love of the One who created you to make an impact for His sake, as His beloved son or daughter. Experience the community of faithfulness that we can only know inside of His Kingdom. Live in the world as it truly is, as an image-bearer of the One who made you to be someone you could never be on your own, exceedingly and abundantly more than you could ever ask or imagine.
