Living the High Life

[HKHaugan]

Living the High Life

As you might have guessed by now I like old movies. Some were black and white and had fake backgrounds using 'rear screen projection.' Others were in color, a new advancement at the time. The point here is that the dynamics of relational interplay in them are really no different from our present human reality. It's only the technology that has changed and become more advanced. We may laugh at the seemingly overdone morality, the hairdo's and clothing but the message they carried can hit home right where we are. The sad part about old movies is that it takes living in the age they were made to feel their impact and understand the context they portray. Succeeding generations have absolutely no idea what they were really conveying.

In the 1949 movie, Knock On Any Door, a gang member philosophically sums up his frustration of living in a dead-end New York City environment when he says, “Live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse.” In many ways it categorizes much of the secular world’s philosophy, which tells us to get what we can while we can, no matter what you have to do to get it. In West Side Story a gang member named Action angrily interrupts a neighborhood store owner who reprimands him by saying, “When I was your age...” Action says, “You ain't never been my age, my mother, my father, ain't none of you ever been my age!” That's a deep feeling vented by the truth that anyone feels in a moment of lonely frustration when your sense of being, identity and purpose are living on the surface of survival. For Action, his momentary obsession was being a gang member defending his turf from foreign invasion. The gang was everything; his identity, his security and his future which was only his moment to moment survival.

Gang mentality, spiritual poverty, is alive and well in many of our cities and around the world. And it is not limited to so called 'gangs.' It can be sophisticated 'ganging' in corporate boardrooms, denominational church leadership, fraternities and sororities, college faculty politics, school bullying, neighborhood gossip, prison groupings and this names only a few.

I remember sensing the lostness and futility other kids felt while living on the edge of East Harlem. I had just moved up from North Carolina as I was entering my teen years, a culture shock to say the least. The one difference between them and myself was the fact that I knew what many of them did not know. There was a whole other world outside the slum neighborhoods and the concrete asphalt canyons they were accustomed to.

Sure, they saw the pictures of wheat fields in Kansas and the clear surf in Hawaii but those were book and radio show visions. They were not real. Even the veterans that returned from the brutality of WW2 had seen the outside but what they experienced there they worked hard to forget.

Yet there was much more. I knew one day I would escape the nightmare of city life and return to sunshine in open fields, see the mountains and thick forests waking in the morning and the waves crashing on the beach with the incoming tide. I would again hear the accents of different places and taste the richness of local foods. There would again be the fresh faces of people my age who were happy and absorbed in small town banter and milkshake drive-ins. I would not be taken in by a philosophy that sold out to the moment for the ‘pot porridge’ of gang acceptance and the fake toughness of teen bravado, fatalism in the raw.

But all of that was to be eclipsed one day when I found that ‘outside’ was more than being outside the city but outside of the world and in the Spirit. Seeing by faith in Jesus from within instead of being led by what I saw without. Sure, that other world outside the city was alluring but it only set the stage for what later would be entering the deeper reality of a spiritual life in God.

When Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world, how true His words were. He brought us the discovery that everything we see from ‘sea to shining sea’ and in the ‘starry expanse’ reflects the deeper spiritual reality behind them. That for me, the living vitality of faith, brought Him to bear, not only on my mind but also in my heart and soul. When you live in the Spirit it is living faster than the speed of light, where dying to sin and evil is the beginning of a youth that never dies and your corpse is merely a vessel to begin the journey prepared for you from the beginning of the world. Jn.10:10 “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

This means that time as we know it is fleeting and merely a shadow of another kind of time, God's time which has nothing to do with clocks or years or even heartbeats. It is the personal reality of existence as an 'I am', an image of God, in relationship with Him. It's not about chronology but about being a person who thinks, feels and acts. It is not ultimately about a body that is born, gets old and dies. It's all about identity, meaning, purpose and relationships. Life is not about what you see. It's about what you can't see. It's about the 'why' we are here, the reason for our being who we are and what we do with what we have been given in terms of self awareness and the awareness of living with others like us. That's the life Jesus opens for us as we relate to Him.

Life is about relationships, people, spiritual reality and the drive to be what God has designed us to be and finally about the faith that makes it all happen not just while we are here but forever. Life is about the complete personal context that we see in Jesus, relating to Him and to others in that personal context. Life is not an eternal calendar. Life is the person of Jesus always in the present. Life has no chronological time. Life is personal. Jesus, the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb.13:8), He is life and the more we are conscious of Him the more we are conscious of ourselves and our purpose from one moment to the next. It's the world that is trapped in lonely time. In Jesus we are timeless.