Is this how it is?

Is this how it is?

April 13, 2016
Jeff Lampl

“in this hope we were saved”

Romans 8:24 (NIV2011)

Whenever anyone has asked, “have you been saved?”, my thought has been . . . . . .

“saved from what?”.    The Picture above is of Liam Niesen in the movie, “The Grey”.   I saw it years ago, but I can’t get it out of my mind because it begs the question, “Is this how life really is?” 

Spoiler alert:   A plane crashes in Alaska and there are about a dozen survivors (alert: lots of gore and profanity)  Niesen’s character leads the survivors on a trek through the arctic wilderness hoping to find civilization and rescue, all the while being chased by a pack of wolves.   They were seeking salvation (the Bible’s word for rescue).   One by one, each of the survivors is picked off by the wolves or they die in some other way.  The movie ends with Niesen alone, hopelessly preparing to fight off the ravenous wolves who are about to devour him.   In this final scene he recites this poem.

Once more into the fray. 
Into the last good fight I'll ever know. 
Live or die on this day. 
Live or die on this day. 

Could it be that this is what life is really like?   We do our best to live, love, achieve, eat, find pleasures, but mostly struggle, until death picks us off one by one?   Is that it?   Could Shakespeare be right that life is a tale told by an idiot?   Could it be that there is no deeper meaning in anything?

Yet if the movie is intentionally nihilistic (depicting a meaningless world), it fails to achieve its goal.   It, like all other attempts at depicting a nihilistic world, contains within it signs of hope, of rescue, of salvation, of healing, of “something more” existing beyond this material world.

Each survivor changed.  Each softened.  Honesty and altruism grew.   Vulnerability replaced the masks.  Each had moments of introspection, moments of reflecting on what really mattered.   Some grew in moral character.   They became real.   They were getting saved from themselves and when they died, they died different people. 

It’s simply unavoidable.   A hope, a “something more” than what is, is built into the fabric of the world that can’t be squelched.   It appears at the most unlikely and hopeless of times, and it appears to the most cynical and hopeless souls among us.  

It is the message that there is indeed something more, that each of us is something more, and the something more is not just a place “out there” toward which we are being driven, but it is a “something more” which touches the soul of each of us and pulls us toward it.   Ultimately Christians conclude that this something more is God and that the something more that God starts in each of us is his transformation into Christlikeness.   Christians have also concluded that transformation in this life precedes life in the next.

Could it be that suffering, rather than proof of a cruel meaningless, nihilistic world, is instead God’s (coopted from evil) best tool to bring about the salvation of each of us and of world?   The most fundamental thing in all of Christianity is that Good Friday led to Easter Sunday.

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