“We have been created to be receivers, not achievers... Every page of the Bible presents God as the achiever and us as the receivers of this sacred, good work.”
M. Craig Barnes, in The Pastor as Minor Poet (Eerdmans, 2009), reminds us of a truth which has tragically receded from our collective memory: Life is received, not achieved.
To illustrate, I must quote him at length, especially his preliminary discussion in, “The Myth of the Constructed Identity” (chapter 1; pp. 6-9), so please bear with me:
It should not be surprising that the clergy are struggling with identity issues, since nearly everyone else is these days. That’s because we now assume that identity is something we construct for ourselves.
Such a strange idea would never have occurred to previous generations, who accepted identity as an inheritance from the family. [In other words] it didn’t really matter if their kids wanted to be a cobbler, a mother, a serf, or even a king. If that’s what their parents did, it was their lot in life as well... They did that work because it was an expression of who they were. Doing always flowed out of being.
Somehow we managed to turn that around about fifty years ago [ca. 1960]. Now we assume that our identity, [our] being, is determined by what we do. And what we do is totally up to us to decide.
[The past three generations of human beings, in the West, at least, have been] “bombarded with more choices than any generation has ever faced in life... Decisions about Little League, dance, friends, camps, television, smoking, drinking, and whether [or not] to go to church...
No longer does a family spend the formative years of a child’s life inculcating a particular identity... Now the agenda is to raise children to become proficient at making good choices so that when they leave home, they can begin the process of assembling a good future for themselves. Somehow.
We spend an enormous amount of time rearranging life with choices about relationships, children, communities, churches, houses, and other possessions, thinking that we will eventually construct an identity we find fulfilling. I [however] have watched too many people use up most of their fleeting years making choices that really don’t matter. That’s because our ancestors had it right. You cannot determine who you are by what you do.
The biblical depiction of life begins with the words “In the beginning God...” And it ends with a magnificent future that is also created by God. Just about everything in between also testifies to the eternal truth that life is made, redeemed, and certainly blessed by God. It’s a gift to be received with humility and gratitude, not an achievement.
Life is made, redeemed, and blessed by God. It’s a gift to be received, not a goal to be achieved.
Barnes goes on to describe the entire biblical narrative “as the unfolding drama of what happens when humans do not accept [“receive”] their created identity as persons made in the image of God, [designed to be in] communion with their Creator.” Instead, human beings believe the poisonous lie “that their identity [can] be changed by reaching for something other than what they were given by the Creator.”
“All that reaching,” writes Barnes, “has left us with souls filled with nothingness,” the experience, almost, of being un-created. How timely and precious are these words.
To Little League, camps, and television, we can now add insurance plans, retirement funds, school districts, hobbies, political parties, etc.
It’s no wonder our species suffers from unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide. It’s no wonder human beings lash out in verbal, emotional, and physical violence every day. It’s no wonder we’re seeing scores of post-apocalyptic novels, plays, and films, depicting a post-future world.
Human beings in the modern West are bombarded and bewildered by more choices than any generation in history.
Michael Schur’s recent series, The Good Place (2016-2020), illustrates this beautifully. In this hit NBC series, the afterlife experience of every human being is determined by a fixed accounting system which awards points –positive or negative– for each action undertaken on earth. As the show goes on, however, we learn (spoiler alert!), that it becomes more and more difficult to end up in “the Good Place” (i.e., to die with a positive point-total), because every human choice is fraught with an infinite number of unpredictable effects. This both results from the vast array of choices at play, and the increasing complexity of our (post-)modern world.
The series exposes the ‘complexity’ of our world and the unintended consequences of our choices more than it describes the plurality of choices themselves. However, there is a character, Chidi Anagonye, whose unfathomable indecisiveness (e.g., taking almost an hour to select between two different colored hats) provides comic testimony to this modern reality: human beings are expected to choose far too much and too often, leading to a collective sense of paralysis, uncertainty, and fear.
True life, to return to Barnes, is not chosen by us, but is received as the gift that it is. The more we try to construct our own lives, then, the emptier we will be.
As a former pastor, Barnes shares a “benediction” that he would frequently use to end services of worship. It went something like this:
Every day this week you have to decide if you want to achieve your life or receive it. If you make achieving your goal, your constant companion will be complaint, because you will never achieve enough. If you make receiving the goal, your constant companion will be gratitude for all that God is achieving in your life.
Let me close with this:
From the beginning we have been created to be receivers, not achievers... We have been raised [however] to set our goals high, work hard, and achieve our dreams. There is [some] merit to this work ethic, but [if taken too far] it seduces us into thinking that we are the creators of our own destinies... Every page of the Bible [however] presents God as the achiever and us as the receivers of this sacred, good work.
My hope for you all is that you would find profound rest today in the truth that life is not achieved but received.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor