If You Don't Value Death

It's not enough to value Jesus

I think it might be a fair statement to assume most of us do not have a proper appreciation of death. I have been in maybe a couple of slightly near-death experiences that I am aware of. I’m sure you have had your fair share as well. But this doesn’t truly give us a deep-seated value for death itself.

Let me back up and reframe my intended audience here…

To the Philosopher, the humble intellect, my friends, the pontificators, I want to share a truth with you.

Life is meaningless.

The sooner we arrive at that conclusion the sooner we value the right things. I promise this is going somewhere. First, let me tell you a little story.

A Little Story

As someone who studied instead of partying for the first half of my college experience, I studied to understand. I had hoped understanding and fact memorization would eventually turn into the elusive wisdom. Philosophy and thought experiments filled my mouth and sparked many debates across multiple majors at the school I went to. All of it was useless. No one’s lives are better for it. No one has expressed wild and new fantasies or accomplished the grandeur they set out to. I have done so many things in my short life already that have turned into nothing more than dust in the wind. A total waste, an absolute nothing.

I hit a depression while in college during the party period. The girl I was dating had been diagnosed with cancer and was rushed away to her home state’s best possible hospital. I was working on a short film during that time, which was falling apart, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know how to get it back together.

I was on a relatively meaningless call with my girlfriend at the time, and it began to go poorly. She was stressed, for good reason. I was unbelievably selfish and fragile. In a compounding cascade of verbal punches and an avalanche of negative self-harming thoughts filled my mind which led to what happened after the call ended.

I had no money, sitting on top of a parking garage, smoking, in the middle of a small town. I was living a life of absolutely no meaning but talking about meaning daily with friends and not friends as if I was seeking to write a major world-shattering book on it. I was an idiot and in many ways still am. I’m a recovering idiot.

On that parking garage, I realized the three things that matter even while everything else doesn’t.

1. Work

2. Wisdom

3. The Gospel

I promise I will tell you how this story ends once I get these little truths to you.

Work

There is a special meaning that comes from hard work. As my wife raises our kids during the day, every night of blissful sleep is warranted and deserved. Every time I close my work laptop, knowing ten hours of work are gone, I sit with my kids and enjoy them all the more because of it.

Hard work makes other nonwork things better. The amount of money I make is cool and I’m sure anyone would be happy to make it. I’m not a millionaire but do ok. More importantly, I work hard for it. Had someone handed it to me then that would be different. That is the reason not everyone makes the money Jeff Bezos makes. They aren’t willing to work for it. I think this work can go too far. When your whole life is work and there’s nothing else left then it’s gone too far.

But you get the meaning. Work and struggle provide value to the things you work for. It’s a satisfying thing to finish work for the day. If you haven’t, I recommend doing a manual labor, blue color job for some period of time. Could be a side job or a single week of work. That will change your perspective on work.

Work is one of the only truly satisfying things in this life and your work ethic is something that never leaves you.

Wisdom

I can’t be touched, though I shape your fate,
Found in the minds that contemplate.
Older than time, yet always new,
I guide the many, held by few.
What am I?

Have you figured it out?

The answer is wisdom. Which I have no doudt that you are wise enough to have answered. This little riddle has a powerful and simple meaning that shouldn’t be over stated. Wisdom, and the pursuet of it, are the bedrock to the most foolish actions I have ever committed. Rejecting it only led to problems and embrassing it only led to… more problems.

The more you know the more happiness slips through your fingers. The less you know the more bliss you enjoy. Wisdom can save your life and make it horribly misurable.

The proverbs of the Bible state the value of wisdom over and over again till your eye bleed.

Wisdom is useless and terible IF you don’t have the being from which it comes. Everyone encounters the moment, sometimes multiple moments, where you realize everyone dies. The fact that we all die makes anything we build worthless. Sure you can try to build a kingdom, but even if the kingdom stands after you’re gone you won’t be able to do jack with it.

The only thing that brings value to anything we do in a limited life on earth is the being who can provide soemthing after it. This brings me to the last point of this article.

The Gospel

Oh yes… Jesus did die for a bunch of foolish, ignorant, moronic, selfish assholes.

Yeah, I said it. We suck. We try to get better. We take steps forwards. We stumble. We fall back further than where we started. We pick ourselves back up. Rince and repeat till you die.

Sounds awefully missurable…

This struggle is never ending. Wisdom does aid us in getting past some of it. But like I mentioned earlier, it’s futile. What’s the point?

There is no point unless you break down and ask for help. Pride, as I love to repeat, get’s in the way of everything. You only fail because you think you can do it yourself. I thought I could do it myself. This is what brings me back to that night at the public parking garage downtown.

All my talk of meaning and meaningful things meant nothing because I was hiding a deep emptiness that my cancer girlfriend couldn’t give me. I had no hope. As one hopefuless person does, they stop valuing themselves. They throw off the self preserving manerisms. Sometimes, the mind starts to wonder what would happen if…

What if pain wasn’t such a bad thing…?
What if it wasn’t so “painful” if you got use to it…?
What if pain was a little fun…?

As I lit my last cigarette, I wondered what it would feel like. The emotional pain I felt, depressed, and dearly meaningless surely couldn’t compare to the physical pain of burning a hole in my… let’s go with my arm…

So I tattooed myself with the red hot blunt end of a cigarrette. And it hurt. But yes you do get use to it. When it went out, I blew the ash from my arm and and lit it back up again. I ahve to get those final details to my new arm art.

I was in such disbelief in the power of a loving God that I became self destructive on a new level.

The End

This article isn’t to convince you that God is the only tue help, love, and value you can find in this world. Though it’s tue, I want you to let yourself really think about what could be more valuable than a God who defines value.

All the most valuable things in the world amount to very little more than simply doing things that provide contrast to your life. Work make one thing different than the other. Wisdom leads to something different. The Gospel saves like nothing else can.

My friends, stop talking meaninglessly about meaningful things and start really valuing the things that matter for yourself… I’d start with yourself.