Posted on 10/19/2014 10:38:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
He’s very smart, my childhood best friend, and very faithful in his atheism. When he was 6 he was clever as clever, but now he’s past 60 and knows he will not live for ever and ever. Yet now, as in years past, even the most modest mention of God brings a growl: “Don’t proselytize me.”
He called me this summer and pleaded that I come visit him, so I hopped on a plane and did. He has many physical problems for which doctors have prescribed this and that, with meds for one ailment making another worse. He has worse psychological problems, which he first summarizes with sociology speak: “I lack a support network.” Then he speaks more plainly: “I’m all alone.”
He puts his head on the table and says, “I don’t know what to do.” He’s haunted by unused potential: “I’ve wasted my life.” He programmed computers for others but never worked on any trend-setting products. He knew some women but never married. No children. He knows he could go underwater with hardly a ripple. He doesn’t look back proudly at anything in his life, including military service. Seems noble to me, but he says all he learned was, “It’s better to be a live coward rather than an f-ing dead hero.”
For a time he took satisfaction from his financial worth, having socked away maybe $2 million, but he long expected a stock market crash, kept his money in cash and commodities, and missed recent run-ups. He’s angry about that, and blames the Federal Reserve. He blames politicians. He blames Obama, for whom he voted.
He says he would be suicidal except that he fears death and oblivion. When he was working, he could keep his brain busy on computer problems. When he stopped working, he could keep his brain busy learning a new language and his legs busy by learning how to dance. But at some point the void within him became unbridgeable by activity. He stared at the void and reacted with the cry of Ecclesiastes from 3,000 years ago: “Meaningless.”
Some Christian writers have understood what my childhood friend is going through. Blaise Pascal wrote in 1670, “I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short time which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infinities on all sides, which surround me as an atom and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die: What I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.”
T.S. Eliot wrote in 1925, “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men.” A half-century later Walker Percy described the contemporary secular man as one who “works, grows old, gets sick, and dies and is quite content to have it so, [living] as if his prostate were not growing cancerous, his arteries turning to chalk, his brain cells dying off by the millions, as if the worms were not going to have him after all.”
But what happens when secular man wises up and is no longer content?
I spent three days with my childhood friend as his world was disintegrating. He was in despair, but I can’t consider that a bad thing: With his hostility toward God, he should be in despair. He has to hit bottom before he can rise, and maybe his only chance is to hit bottom. But how will he then bounce up? Augustine wrote in his Confessions that he was “speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighboring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read; Take up and read.’”
Augustine did that, picking up Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. When others will not take up and read, true change seems impossible. Except, except…with God, nothing is impossible.
Prayers for your friend.
All of us who reach a certain age, know that the majority of our lives are behind us. Especially upon reaching retirement, we have to consider that we are much closer to the finish line than to the beginning of our lives.
With your friend’s health problems, his mortality is something that he can’t avoid thinking about.
I hope he finds contentment and inner peace somehow. If it happens through faith and abandoning atheism, that would be wonderful.
There is no one so lonely as the one without God.
I look back on life with many regrets, but my looking forward to an eternity with my God makes me glad for life and the hope that lives in my heart.
God loves your friend and nothing can stop that love. It is there for the simple trust and acceptance of ones heart. It isn’t the brain or logic one has to deal with but the heart in simple child like faith.
Very well said.
I have had setbacks and made mistakes in life. I’m only human. But am not concerned about eternity, due to my faith.
By design, we are given just a short period of time; time to be born, and time go grow up, and time do decide what to do with our lives, and time to decide whether we’re going to make a difference or not.
Unfortunately, most will amount to just consumers of time, and of food and material goods.
When our time is done, most will come to the realization that, perhaps we didn’t count. Maybe next time. Next time.
Is it as simple as the Sinners Prayer,,?
I have a situation similar to this.
My sisters son,Army Major,40 ish.
Faced with a brain cancer and is panicked by “going to Hell”
very sad,
Death - the last great adventure.
Next Time??
for it is appointed man once,,,
then comes Judgement.
Amen
Look at Robin Williams. To us, he appeared to be a man who had everything. Yet, he was so unhappy that he ended his own life. That was a wake up call for the Baby Boomers. I think many of them continue to sleep.
My brother is clever and very bright, and it is impossible to get anywhere with him on any topic, because all of his efforts go into avoiding ever getting to the meat, it is all witty quips and diversions, useless.
Have him read Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. If Scrooge could be reclaimed, anyone can.
Bookmark
But A Christmas Carol is fiction, and good works won't do it.
Rosebud,
Remember when you were happiest.
is “self fulfilment” our ultimate goal,escaping back to a time in our own minds?
Reaching Forward to a grand design incomprehensable to Our finite minds
seems a more exciting and noble endeavor.
We are all panicked about going to hell. We rely on God’s grace offered by His Son as our only hope. That is all we have, our hope in His grace.
As the worse of sinners I have often prayed to be the dust under the feet of the saints as they enter the gate. If I find myself in darkness I will keep the hope alive for eternity.
Amazing they can be provoked to blind hatred and rage at someone they claim to be imaginary!
You could tell them Peter Pan is gonna save them, and Captn Hook will take them to hell, and they will laugh.
So obviously they DO Know, and believe in The One! Otherwise they would laugh it off like Peter Pan!
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