"You don't belong here"

• Making sense of our lives

I take my two pugs for a walk in the neighborhood every day. They are much more observant that I sometimes realize. When something is there that wasn’t there in the last few weeks, they stop and bark at it. Recently, on a beautiful mid-West Sunday afternoon in June, two balloons bobbed around on top of a neighbor’s mailbox. A nearby sign read, “GRAD.” I was happy for the young man who had just graduated.

But my dogs had different thoughts. The easy going one stood near the mail box and steadily barked and barked at the balloons: as if to say, “Go. You don’t belong.” The excitable one crouched, charged and vigorously barked and barked. “Go away,

right now. You don’t belong.” They only stopped barking when I made them move on and keep walking. Their adamant bark had proclaimed: This doesn’t belong here and needs to be driven out so that normalcy can be restored.

In the biblical framework, God is the transcendent creator who is distinct from creation. After God had created the first human beings, they decided to reject God’s moral framework and live their way, not his – to live for themselves, not with him and for him. The result was alienation from God and each other as well as a multitude of troublesome results: anxiety, fearfulness, a loss of inner freedom, a difficult life for themselves and a spoiled creation that had been originally good. They didn’t belong in close fellowship with God and were driven out from his presence.

As their descendents, our natural tendency is to live our lives without God and for ourselves: to promote ourselves, entertain ourselves, and justify ourselves often at the expense of our fellow human beings. We gladly live the life of Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” (1976). If we peeled away our self-sufficiency, we might admit: apart from God we lack the inner strength to resist our lower impulses. But, anyway, we might counter: why would we want to? We were born that way and, as some in the 60’s generation said, “If it feels good, do it.”

If we use atheistic materialists like Dawkins to beckon us to some kind of altruism, we face a self-defeating barrier. Under atheistic materialism, there is no purpose and there is no meaning in nature. Altruism has no real purpose and significance. If we, on the other hand, use eastern mysticism to serve as our cheerleader, we face another self-defeating barrier. Ultimately, right and wrong is all one, because all (the good deeds, charitable action, acts of violence, heinous crimes of people), in the final analysis, is god.

Thus, we are stuck if we are on a quest for inner peace and freedom as we live in a difficult world. At the same time, there is a larger problem. Apart from God (the personal absolute of goodness, truth, beauty and love) we lose a sense of moral absolutes and lose a belief in accountability to the Divine Judge and standard setter. If we were honest, we would admit, “We are at odds with each other and the world. We don’t really belong here, even though this appears to be our world.”

However, God came and lived among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus called us back to the Father when he announced the Gospel, the Good News. On the cross where he died, he paid the penalty for our broken relationship with God and showed that this penalty was accepted with God by rising from the dead. He announces to all people everywhere, “Come to me, receive needed forgiveness for your selfish ways, and receive needed power because I’ll send my Spirit to live in you. Follow me; in my power, spiritually slay the supreme love of self; and every day rise to live according the Gospel. Join the Christian community and learn the Gospel. Life will still be difficult, but now you belong.”