Who Am I and What Am I Doing?

Assorted reflections on turning 35

I turn 35-years-old today. It doesn’t feel like a particularly significant birthday, other than being one that ends in a five. That makes it feel a bit more like a checkpoint than 36 or 37 will feel, I suppose.

A month or two ago I read Everything Is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson. In it, Jamieson walks through a number of key themes throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. This will probably end up being one of my favorite books of the year. I read it alongside re-reading Ecclesiastes the last couple of months.

Today I want to share some of my favorite bits of the book with you and how they put words to how life has been the last year or so.

Depression Is the Fruit of Navigating Absurdity

What does it mean to “struggle with depression”? I can’t say I’ve “struggled with depression” in the way that phrase is often used—describing a sort of frequent fight with feelings of hopelessness and despair that may require some kind of pharmaceutical or therapeutic intervention. But I have certainly “struggled with depression” in the literal sense, sometimes succumbing to prolonged periods of sadness and malaise despite my best efforts to win or evade the fight entirely.

In his second chapter on the topic of hevel, highlighting the absurdity of life, Jamieson has a long section on depression and it makes up probably the strongest pages of the whole book. Below are a handful of quotes from that section (bolding mine):

Depression is the inevitable shadow side of a society in which every man and woman is his or her own sovereign. It is a consequence not of acting badly but of feeling unable to act at all.

….

Our whole existence has been rendered vulnerable, precarious, insecure. Change is a threat because it can always bring harm or failure. Depression is the price millions of people pay for the demand that you be more than human: that you create yourself, surpass yourself, act on your own marvelously malleable nature, and make yourself more than yourself. Depression is the shattering sense that you are only yourself, and yourself is not enough.

….

We are irreparably estranged from this work that, despite being our home, doesn’t feel like much of a home, and we are equally estranged from ourselves. As Christian Wiman laments, “What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?” In such a strange, estranged world, and with such strange, estranged selves, depression is not necessarily a sign that you are viewing your life wrongly. Instead, it could measure the suffocating weight of all that you rightly see is wrong with the world, and even some of what is wrong with yourself. Walker Percy says,

You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Depression is the fruit of living in an absurd world— a world broken by an unwelcome omnipresence of sin that discolors everything everywhere all of the time. When you have a deep sense that the world is not your home, depression is uncomfortably close.

I think sometimes it’s easy to look at someone who is grappling with depression and wonder, “How could you be so sad? Look at all you have!”

Rich people grapple with depression.

Proud parents struggle with it.

Accomplished artists know the fight.

How? Why?

Even those who live the most charmed lives struggle with depression because even the most charmed life falls woefully short of the world we were made for.

A handful of times in the last year, when I have come nose-to-nose with feelings of depression, I’ve wondered how I could feel so aimlessly bummed out when I have so much. And this collection of passages help me put words to what I already knew.

How, then, have I fought the feelings of hopelessness that can so easily come with middle-agedness? By seeing life, as absurd as it is, as a gift and, by seeing the simplest pleasures as sources of deep joy.

Unmatched Joy and Life as a Snow Day

Later in Everything Is Never Enough, Jamieson has chapters on “Gift” and “Enjoy” that pair well together. Recognizing that this world is not my home often leads to feelings of despair, but appreciating this world for what it is often helps me dispel those feelings.

For me, this looks like seeing my life and this world as a gift to be enjoyed for now, rather than seeing it as a hope for fulfillment forever. Everything in life is a means to an end that exists outside of life as we know it, in a place and time without end.

Jamieson finishes his chapter on seeing life as a gift with this, “To receive life as a gift is to recognize that this universe has a moral center and you aren’t it.”

In the following chapter on enjoying life as a gift, Jamieson writes about how life is best seen as a snow day:

Learning to receive everything as a gift from God’s hand turns life itself into a snow day. What can you do with a snow day? You can’t control it. You can’t schedule it. You can’t order it for delivery. You can’t will a forecast into a guarantee. You have no say over how much snow will fall or how long it will stay. All you can do is enjoy it.

….

Life itself is unfathomable and inexhaustible. If you want to enjoy it more, quiet your heart, commit your mind, and open your hands and your eyes.

How could this life, though so strictly limited, be inexhaustible? Because every gift bears a trace of its giver, and every day and breath and moment is given by the inexhaustible God.

…

Though the days of your life are restricted, the depth of the good in them is not.

So much joy is found in the simple depths of everyday life. In ways we cannot plan or orchestrate or control. This is part of what makes them beautiful, and it also makes them hard to pin down or predict.

A significant part of growing older, for me, has been realizing that some of the greatest joys and pleasures of life are most readily found tucked amid everyday rhythms and not on some far-off vacation or transformative life experience.

I wrote about this recently, reflecting on C. S. Lewis’s words in A Letter to Malcolm. He writes in that book:

Gratitude exclaims, very properly: ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says: ‘What must be the quality of Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window—one’s whole cheek becomes a sort of palate—down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time.

One of the most effective weapons in my fight against the occasional despair that comes with recognizing the world is not as it should be is the practice of grabbing hold of the glimpses of God’s glory in creation amid the brokenness and tracing those glimpses “up the sunbeam” to the Creator himself.

I’ve often joked that a lot of Christians deal with their midlife crises by becoming Wendell Berry fans, and I can tell you I’m pretty much there in spirit even if I haven’t quite hit midlife or read a Wendell Berry book.

I have something like six bird feeders in the backyard full of seed at any given time, along with a couple of bird houses that may or may not have tenants depending on the season. I try to enjoy long walks at my local park as often as I go to my local gym, even if going to the gym may yield a more robust workout. I attempt to make one or two meals a week that are new or require a bit more time and attention than a midweek crockpot or spaghetti night demands.

The more I feel life speed up, the harder I have found myself working to intentionally slow it down.

But beyond that, I’m always revisiting a couple of key questions.

Who Am I and What Am I Doing?

Back in his section on depression, Jamieson shared this quote from Walker Percy, which I shared earlier in this article:

You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

And then Jamieson asks:

Do you know who you are and what you are doing?

I’ve spent a ton of time in the last year asking these questions of myself, before I even read Jamieson ask them so pointedly in his book.

Who am I? What am I doing?

Asking questions like this resulted in significant clarity around what I would call my “North Star.” My North Star is this:

I exist to steward the gifts God has given me for the glory of God and the good of other people.

I’ve held this sort of “North Star” idea for some time, but this year has brought it into focus in new ways.

This year solidified for me that I am not a “career man,” who will do whatever it takes to climb some kind of occupational ladder to a level of amorphous success that may come with a luxurious payday and an impressive title. I don’t know if I ever really was a “career man,” such that it impinged on other parts of my life. But because I am driven, relentless, and always wanting to improve, I know that, unchecked, I could easily prioritize my work above all else.

That said, it’s somewhat easy to not be a career man when you’re in ministry because rarely does climbing any sort of ladder come with a payday that would be worth the toll that such climbing takes on yourself or your family. It may be a bit more tempting to chase career success at all costs if generational wealth were on the table by climbing the ladder. My fight is more of an internal battle to know when I’ve given enough of myself to my work in any given season.

Along the lines of not being a career man, I’ve really doubled down on how I want be a dad to my girls. Put simply: I want to be present. For instance, earlier this year I wrote about how I will never commute again. With total understanding that this will prevent me from some number of career opportunities, I just decided this year that no job is worth losing two or more hours multiple days a week with my family so I can make a little more money and Important Decisions. It just isn’t.

I am grateful to God for another year of life and for what he has taught me this year about who he is, who I am, and who I am not.

This has been a year of finding radical contentment in the simplest of things, of tracing the sunbeam up to the sun, and of piercing through dark nights and foggy days to see clearly the North Star that God has for me to follow.