Grand Adventure?

My natural inclination is to see life as a grand adventure. This doesn't mean I don't have responsibilities. Of course I do. If I had kids, I'd have even more responsibilities, but as it is, I still think I have a responsibility to seek God's will for me, to love my neighbor, and to care for God's creation. So it's not an adventure in the sense that it doesn't matter what I do. It's an adventure in that life is filled with uncertainty and that's okay.

When I was a kid, I thought that soon after adulthood I'd have it all figured out, that I'd get a job and stay in the same career forever, that I'd settle down somewhere and have the same group of friends and acquaintances forever more, and that I would know how to handle everything that came my way. My imaginings were fairly devoid of emotion, and in fact I wondered how adulthood would manage to avoid being boring. Since then, I've changed careers twice and have yet to really get established in one (though I'm hoping third career is the charm!) and my life has been full of fascinating people drifting in and out depending on where their own paths take them. I certainly don't know how to handle everything, and I've found myself in situations I never imagined as a child – but I'm starting to feel that with God's help, I can handle things.

I sometimes find myself wondering if there's a fine line between faith and fatalism and which side of that line I might be on. I've been on anti-anxiety meds for a while, and I'm a really different (and dysfunctional) person when I'm off of them, but in the seven or so years I've been on them, and especially in the past three or so, and most strongly in the past year, I've developed an odd sense of detachment. It doesn't necessarily kick in when I'm in the thick of a situation, but when I'm thinking about my future, I feel what might seem like an alarming lack of anxiety. I'm still job-hunting, I don't know what my prospects are like, and I don't know what I'll wind up doing. I don't know which people will stay in my life over the years, I don't know if I'll remain healthy, I don't know what climate change is going to do to the planet.

I'm not indifferent to those things. I hope that we won't see the worst global warming scenarios come true. I certainly would rather be healthy than not, and I hope to keep my close friends. I would prefer to end up in work that's interesting and contributes to society and allows for a comfortable work-life balance. But there are two factors that keep me from worrying a lot: one is that I can't control most of these things. I can do my part, but life is going to do what it's going to do. For any situation, I think it's a personal choice how much to seek to control and mitigate and how much to just let things happen and hope for the best. Somewhat oddly, the second factor is that there's a lot I can control. I can't control exactly what happens to me, but if I'm not happy, I can change something. I don't have to stay in a job I hate; I can look for another job or move into a smaller place and scale back financially. If I experience a major setback, I can still stay connected to my friends and the church and find much that's fulfilling in life.

It's at this point where I start to worry about being callous or unsympathetic or insensitive. One reason is that I'm very fortunate. I have enough material and psychological and social resources to cushion the blows of anything really hard that happens to me. Not everyone has that, and it's a heck of a lot easier to say you're confident that things will turn out okay when you're not living on the edge. As a society, I think we need to be working on pulling people back from that edge. It's not right that there are people stuck in jobs that make them miserable because they're desperate to feed their kids or keep their health insurance. And I think it's a fallacy to say that someone just has to do the miserable jobs. We can develop technology to improve them, we can adjust working conditions and benefits so that they're not miserable but are actually decent jobs, we can insist that all workers be treated as human beings and not just as economic resources. God didn't intend for anyone to be exploited for the benefit of those with more power.

I can also come across as generally out of touch here because it still might sound like I don't care what happens in my life. I care very much. I have a lot of emotions. And it's more likely than not that I'll face some very painful things over the course of my life just because that seems to be the nature of life. I've been lucky so far. But I do maintain that being joyful and confident now isn't going to make bad things happen. There's a part of my mind that seems to think I owe it to the seriousness of life's problems to not be too relaxed, to be waiting for the other shoe to drop, and that not doing so means being in denial or being insensitive or tempting fate. But I don't think God actually looks around and says “Oh, that person doesn't have enough anxiety; better do something to them!” And I do kind of feel that whatever happens in my life, God will be present and that His presence will make enough difference, not to keep painful things from happening, but to keep them from destroying me.

But then what to do with the fact that people are destroyed? Hunger and war and sickness and loss and abuse do in fact grind people into despair. I can only hold on to the hope that God carries them through those terrible things to the other side, to a state of peace and joy. And in my own case as well, by not being destroyed, I don't mean avoiding death – of course I'm going to die someday. And I don't mean avoiding loss of home or health or loved ones or freedom or sanity. Rather I mean a belief that God will see me through, either to His good will for me in this life, or to healing and love in the next.