Indulge me a hypothetical scenario.
Let’s say someone was born in an area that he grew up to only want out of. There was a lack of culture there, a vacuum, and a lack of understanding as to who he was…not from his family, but from the world around him. He went to college nearby, and the vacuum left its mark. This was sort of like a fundamental incompatibility. He just didn’t fit. One of the results of this was that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.
Of course, he grew up. That happens whether one wants to or not, and so he cycled through three majors in college before achieving a degree. He didn’t have the connections in that area to do what he really wanted, so he ended up in a field that was largely unrelated to his degree. He liked it, though, so he threw himself into it, identified with it, became good at it. He learned about people in that profession. Until, one day, he realized that maybe there was something else out there.
You see, he had held God largely at the periphery for a lot of his adult life, and now was impressed with the realization of how unsustainable that was. Through a series of events that were based largely around his discontent with still living in that area, he got his arms around his faith for likely the first time in his life. He walked away from one particular experience feeling that he actually knew God for the first time, and that changed everything, as it must. And so he pursued that into ministry, into graduate studies, and into a new profession. That profession turned out to be short-lived, but the studies involved altered everything even further. The problem was that, as he learned so many new things, he didn’t realize that he didn’t know what he thought he knew, and so he left behind his experiences so far, because he felt they were incompatible. He was beginning a new life without a foundation, as a sort of misguided concept of repentance.
Except that a foundation, once laid, tends to stay put. As he grew and finished his graduate studies, he realized one day by hanging some theatre masks on his wall that he was who he was in large part because of his experiences, and that those experiences were not only not bad in and of themselves, but informed his newfound relationship with God. And so, he had to re-think some things.
Growing up has a way of continuing to happen, though. So, as he was trying to figure all of this out, he fell in love and got married, and, because bills continue to arrive whether one is trying to figure out life or not, he returned to that original vocation to pay them. Then their first child, and then and then and then…many dreams, and much difficulty in making them a reality, difficulty borne primarily of indecisiveness and discontent.
And then, one day, because of those bill that kept arriving, they decided another career change was in order, and so he returned to school to enter a very technical field. He had learned about people, he had become (he hoped) close with God, his creative spark was always working…but he entered a technical field. Pay the bills it did, certainly, earning back the cost of the new schooling in short order, but it took so much and gave back little else. And then a second child. And, somehow, 15 years vanished in a blur of frenetic activity that accomplished only unimportant things and left him missing what was overwhelmingly important.
And that, you see, brings us to now, and this person…this subject of our hypothetical thought experiment…is once again rejecting something through a fundamental incompatibility, feeling an exasperation with both this third career as well as the fact that the world trusts technology more than people, science more than art. And he dreams, and the dreams continue to not come true, because the data keeps interfering.
What is there to do? What should this person do? What would be the next step to make it right?
Asking for a friend.
“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse?” – Bruce Springsteen