Lenten Reflections: Week 6

This is the sixth and last of the Reflections for Lent on the adventure of living a meaningful life. I concluded last week’s reflection by strongly advising you to come to know the Lord Jesus by reading the Gospels. Christ is the example for us of living a meaningful life.  In his life he comes to do battle against the forces of chaos, sin and death, and his means of doing so is what lies at the core of the meaningful life. Looking around you, seeing what needs to be done and then acting on that, in your own life first, and then for the broader community. It is speaking and acting on the truth, motivated by love.  

A short while back there was a course taught at Yale University called ‘Psychology and the Good Life.” It was also called “The happiness class.” It was the most popular class taught there in 300 years with one out of four students taking the course. A reporter writing on the success of this new course also commented on the phenomenon of so many young people, with all the indicators of worldly success and their whole lives ahead of them, feeling so disillusioned and depressed as to want a course on how to be happy.  

Begin your search for “happiness” by embracing the bounty we have already been provided by the giver of all good gifts. As I’ve said looking for happiness as the immediate goal takes us into the realm of the four big categories of money, power, pleasure, and fame. Happiness comes from the pursuit of a meaningful life, even as difficult or daunting as that may seem. Just when the world is asking deep questions of the soul, we ought to be answering with the good news of Jesus Christ.  We offer the most genuinely significant way to find good and do good. We of all people should be singing the song of redeeming love. But that takes discipline and a discipleship against negative attitudes and destructive habits that pull us off the song of the redeeming love of Christ.   

We are children of the Creator God and we cannot ever successfully run away from that identity. It is who we are, and so our lives can and should reflect that great identity.  Our interaction with one another should also reflect that identity as brothers and sisters, children of the Eternal Father.