Having It All

“You can have it all” is one of Satan’s lies which finds expression in many different cultures.  It all started back in the garden of Eden, when as they were enjoying paradise, our first parents believed the serpent’s lie that they could add “being as God” to the perfection they already knew.  They acted on it and disaster struck.  God said, in effect, “You can’t have it all.  If you want the knowledge of good and evil, you will have to give up perfection.”

Over and over, people have attempted to gain back what was lost.  Trying to overturn the effects of the curse, they seek to have everything they want without understanding that, with the limits of time, many of the things we want are mutually exclusive.

Here’s a little list of things people want (not in any particular order):
1. Money
2. A great career
3. Meaning or significance
4. Physical attractiveness
5. Excitement
6. Longevity
7. Comfort
8. Satisfying relationships
9. Love
10. Pleasure

Here’s a little list of areas of conflict between elements of the “What people want” list:
1. The desire for pleasure and comfort conflicts with the desire for money because you’ll find very few ways to be paid handsomely for staying happy and comfortable.
2. A great career is often in conflict with satisfying relationships.  The time you devote to improving the one will inevitably force reduction in the quality of the other.
3. The desire for excitement and the desire for longevity often bump heads.  Excitement often involves risky behaviour which has a way of cutting life short (or reducing its quality sharply).
4. Physical attractiveness conflicts with comfort, whether you’re working out in the gym, denying yourself a second piece of cheesecake or recovering from plastic surgery.
This list is at least as long as the first one, but we’ll stop here. 

The metaphysical world - the world of spirit, emotion, desire, ambition, relationships, the non-tangible - operates by rules as harsh and unforgiving as the physical world.
1.  You can’t get more out of a relationship than you put in, just as the amount of chemical reaction depends on the quantity of agents which feed it.
2.  If you treat others as if they were incapable of feeling, they’ll feel it deeply and likely return the compliment, just as Newton described in his third law of motion, which points out that when any force is applied to an object an equal and opposite force comes into play.
3.  You have to keep adding energy in some form to reaching your goal or it will all come to nought, just as the second law of thermodynamics predicts.

Laws of physics often apply equally to handling money, building relationships, having a career, or reaching personal goals.  In each case, without putting something more in, you’ll get less and less out until you have nothing.  That’s why it’s so important to choose what really matters to us and go after that.  It’s a shame to get well along in life and realize that we’ve neglected what really matters to us, while our considerable achievements have turned to dust.

The problem we all face is that we are limited creatures.  Perhaps in paradise, before the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve could have had a mutually fulfilling relationship, been Olympian athletes, incomparable musicians, great writers, skilled entrepreneurs, and who knows what else, all at the same time.  But we’re not in paradise.  We’re living in a universe where everything (according to the laws of physics) is running down moment by moment.  

This includes us, much as we hate to admit it.  We can keep the pendulum swinging as long as we keep adding energy to the system, but what happens when we can’t do that any more?  It will be pointless to blame others then.  They were busy swinging their own pendulums.  Eventually everything reaches a state of rest and, in our case, the state of dust.

If life isn’t working out for you, maybe you’ve been putting your effort into the wrong things - things that ultimately don’t matter, things which are limited to this physical world which, according to scientists, is slowly deteriorating.  

Over and over, God reminds us in His word that He created us to be other-centred.  Our tendency, of course, is to be self-centred, setting goals which will contribute to our personal fulfillment.  Inevitably, when we do that, we will find ourselves struggling with competing values and having to make choices we’d prefer to avoid.

The other day, I needed a reminder of what loving others looks like from God’s perspective.  It came when I awoke in the middle of the night and from the radio came the following words:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.  (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)