Week 16: Superfluous

The "Opportunity" Rover on the prowl 225 million miles from Earth. (Picture courtesy of NASA)

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
(Ecclesiastes 3:11)

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know--if you've ever picked a scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away." -Edmund

(The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis)

On our Sabbath day, we colored and drew and then showed each other what we had drawn.  My wife, who loves elephants and is an incredible artist, drew an elephant that was so beautiful, our five-year old wanted to draw one, too. (And he did!) Our eleven-year old drew himself thinking on a park bench in early spring with a newly-leafed tree overhead. Awesome! And our little, eight-year old knight drew a castle complete with cracked mortar, a climbing vine, secret passages and a massive, gated door. I drew a silly cartoon of our fattest chicken and our smallest chicken, side by side.  I would have drawn two eggs in the picture, but I am a bit of a realist in my artistic endeavors.

It was completely frivolous, but billy-oh! So much fun. No great thinking was done. No great songs were composed. The kitchen project languished. And we didn't feed the poor or command armies or walk on the surface of the moon. Yet, the political system didn't collapse. The Kingdom of God was in good hands. The earth continued to spin in this little corner of our ever-expanding universe. 

But I felt a little guilty.  I want my work to matter.  Most of my adult life, I have scratched and clawed about the surface of the earth like a chicken hunting for a junebug.  I stay up and work late. But as I put the finishing touches on my cartoon chickens, I thought that even if there was a person who managed to scratch and claw and control all the resources of Earth, and that same person commanded universal power and unlimited riches, all that accomplishment would have about as much impact on our universe as my drawing of a funny little chicken.  Not much. 

The world is just too big for us to matter.  After all, the observable universe (from our little corner of it) is about 92 billion light years in diameter. (And that is just what we can see!) In fact, some scientists believe that there is no end to it.  I think the sobering truth is that we are superfluous sprinkles adrift on a superfluous speck on the outer rim of a superfluous galaxy. But it's beautiful, isn't it?  The whole thing...elephants and castles and trees over park benches; chickens and solar systems and the double-helix of DNA. The superfluous part is the beautiful part.   

So, maybe we need to quit acting like a chicken, and start drawing one. Maybe we need to stop trying to do the important thing and try to do the beautiful thing. The thing that doesn't matter on Wall Street may be the most important thing of all.  Maybe we need to let Aslan peel away our false skin of relevance and self-importance and ambition.  It may hurt a little, to realize that we aren't nearly as important as we thought we were, but when it was all over, like Edmund, I believe that we will be much happier, knowing that our lives our not merely utilitarian, they are wonderfully beautiful and spectacularly superfluous.

Church Stopping. Less doing. More being.