The life you long for is hidden in the life you have

We had a night not so long ago where both kids were awake continually. It was a constant cycle of changing nappies, dispensing medicine, cradling and trying to comfort those cries that bounce off the walls without mercy. It was brutal, and I’m not going to attempt to romanticise it, but there’s something about a night like that which screams to you: “This is your life!” and you have to listen.

Becoming a father has taught me (among many humbling things) that true liberation is found in embracing life’s limitations. There is no way to love a person without acknowledging the sacrifice that loving them requires – unless you only love on your terms, which isn’t love at all.

Limitation is baked into the human experience; if you have yet to find that out, you soon will. You overcome your financial burdens and transcend your vocational restrictions; you sail into the sunset, thinking yourself free, only to pick up the phone and find out that your friend is sick.

It is a narrow path, Jesus said, that leads to eternal life, and that notion overturns the tables on so much of our thinking about success and fulfilment. We want space, options and opportunities and assume that, without them, our lives are less or somehow deferred, but, as the playwright Paula D’Arcy puts it, “God comes to us disguised as our life”.

We who seek enlightenment and the liberated self must return to the life of our commitments, with their dirty dishes and MOTs, relational complexities and budgets. A life without limits only leads us to miss out on the one we’re actually living, and so we learn to pay attention to the inconvenience and the moments we’d rather miss entirely. Instead, we see them “for the fathomless mystery they are”, says Frederick Buechner.

So, woe to the influencers who peddle the lie that a last-minute trip to Bali could offer you something more fulfilling than attending to an ageing parent, failing business or changing your child’s wet sheets for the third time in a week. The life you long for is hidden in the life you have. God comes to us disguised as our life. The repetition of such phrases is needed when our fragile souls are bombarded with the highlight reels of people we scarcely know. 

The most punk rock thing you could do in today’s cultural frenzy is to build the wall before you, as that unlikely Hebrew hero, Nehemiah, did. Love your person with all their imperfections. Keep having hard conversations that result, at least, in being known a little more. Show up to work and stack T-shirts for the glory of God. Do the weekly shop with open eyes, and you’ll run into angels on aisle five next to the cereal. 

Receive for yourself the benediction offered at the end of the recovery meeting I attend each week: “Keep on coming back.” Return to your life, in all its ordinary glory.