[Written January 2012]
If we think of life as a journey, the question arises as to what kind of journey. Are we on a sight-seeing tour? Or are we on a quest?
Life as a sight-seeing tour involves maximizing experience. The idea is to see as much as you can, to go as many places and do as many things as your resources allow. The best expression I have heard of this view is actually from a beer commercial. It says, “You only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get.” (The word “gusto” means hearty, intense experience.)
There are a couple of implications of this view. First, everything is important. If you miss an experience, you have lost something irretrievable. If, for example, you don’t find romantic love, your life is a tragedy. You have lost something you can never recover. Therefore it is important to make sure you grasp opportunity when it comes. In one sense now is all you have, so an experience offered in the now is more valuable than any future good promised or hoped for.
Second, enjoying the trip matters. It’s all about accommodations. This doesn’t necessarily mean ease or luxury—a safari or scuba-diving trip can demand tremendous exertion. But if you don’t enjoy the process and the people you are with, if everything is bollixed up, if you are miserable due to sickness or injury, the trip will be something of a loss. So in life, if circumstances are not fortunate, if there are difficulties and hindrances, the trip suffers—and since the trip is everything, your life is damaged.
Third, most people who are on sight-seeing tours go where all the other sight-seers go. Tours are packaged. The idea is to maximize value. So the tour-goer follows the crowds and experiences the sights in a stereotyped way. In the same way, life as a sight-seeing tour is stereotyped. People encounter life in similar ways, do similar things. They seek out those things as desirable because other people are doing them. They learn to expect the same things out of life as everyone else.
Life as a quest is different. First, the only thing that matters is accomplishing the quest. If you do that, you have done all. It doesn’t matter what you have left undone or had to abandon along the way. Thus if life is a quest, if you gain the goal of the quest you have won it all. As in chess, where a player can sacrifice many pieces to gain the goal of checkmate, in life one can let go of many things to gain the end that life aims at.
Besides this, it’s never too late to accomplish the quest. As long as the quest itself doesn’t have a deadline, then late is as good as early. In the same way, finding the goal of life even in its last minutes is enough to make one’s life a success.
Second, on a quest the difficulties encountered along the way don’t matter. They may give the quest a nobility that it might otherwise lack, and they may make the quest a lonely endeavor as they discourage others from attempting it, but they change nothing fundamental. They are just there to be endured. Indeed, they must be endured if they lie in the way of the goal. And the difficulties make a certain demand that the sight-seeing tour tries to avoid. The person on a quest must be able to handle difficulties specifically designed to stop him. A sight-seeing tourist mentality may handicap a quester to the point where he would be unable to overcome the necessary difficulties.
Third, quests are lonely. People on quests are single-minded. They aren’t necessarily interested in “stopping to smell the roses.” They have different values. They have a long time-preference; the goal is the thing. They go where the quest leads, not where the crowd leads. Companions are nice; people on a quest take whoever goes, but leave whoever stays. Their lives look different from others. They are “weird.”
Of course you might guess from the above that I believe life is a quest, with a goal, and not a sight-seeing tour. The Bible speaks this way about it. For example, Jesus says, “… any one of you who does not renounce all he has cannot be my disciple.” This is quest talk. Earlier in the same passage he says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” The quest might require leaving behind anyone and everyone.
Philippians 3 is especially full of the rhetoric of the quest. Paul talks about leaving everything behind. In particular he says, “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ….”
There are plenty more places like this. Revelation talks about the overcomer. Hebrews talks about us as pilgrims, and about going outside the camp (where everyone and everything of value is).
I meet few Christians who are on a quest. Most people seem to be sight-seers, not wanting to miss anything, busy “making memories,” taking plenty of snapshots. But life is not behind, it is ahead. The way you get there isn’t important—the important thing is to gain Christ.
Let me end with the following passage from Colossians 3:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
You have died! Your life is hidden with Christ in God. So “seek the things that are above, where Christ is.” It only makes sense.