Sometimes when I tweet I'm just throwing whatever out there, but other times I'm tweeting something that I'm really thinking about or chewing on. Well tonight, a dear friend of mine called me out on a tweet. I said,
"Can't get this idea out of my head. We are the descendants. What we own, we never truly earned & our reward is undeserved."
He responded,
"That quote you posted, what does it mean to you?"
I'm so glad he called me out on it. Because I think through stuff like this quite often, but so rarely do I take the time to write it down. I thought for a few brief moments about how I would respond and then just jumped in. Because I'm a geek for spelling I checked it over once, but other than that, this is what I came out.
"Can't get this idea out of my head. We are the descendants. What we own, we never truly earned & our reward is undeserved."
Well, it's not a quote but just more of the concept presented in the Descendants, the movie, which I felt was wonderful if you haven't seen it. The basic premise is that a hawaiian princess marries a white man. 2 different cultures collide in paradise and hundreds of years later, it comes down to a bunch of cousins who own one of the last plots of virgin land in Hawaii and are trying to figure out what to do with it. So at a signing party, people are talking about how great it will be to sell and have money and do this and that, and George Clooney, as an aside, says something along the lines of, "We never did anything to own this land. It just happened because we were born into THIS family and we had no control over that. And now we're going to reap the rewards of it's sale, again, for something we had nothing/very little to do with aside from signing legal documents."
So, that really got me thinking...
On a human level, I have had a variety of moments in my life where I'm blown away by the fact that I was born a white kid in papilion, nebraska. I had parents who loved me for the most part, went to decent schools, college was a bit of a given, I have a job = what this means, as you say so well, I live a life full of white people / first world problems.
But I've been to Uganda, Morocco, etc.. Been in the slums of the Dominican Republic. I've crawled around the gutters with orphan kids in Kiev, and sat in the middle of a mudhut with a girl near my age who looked at me like I was a god because I was from the West.
And I did nothing to earn any privilege I've been given. I just showed up and was given the gift of being a privileged American in an age of (relatively speaking) plenty.
On a spiritual level, I believe that we are born into sin. That even as kids our hearts beat with selfishness and pride and unforgiveness and anger. We get a little better at hiding it as we grow and we learn to cope, but it's still deep inside of us.
So from a biblical viewpoint (which as you know is what I subscribe to) Jesus shows up, lives a perfect life and dies (Cross) and is resurrected (Easter) and it sitting next to God right now. Because he went through that on our behalf, we become perfect. The Bible actually says that when God looks at those who believe in Jesus, he sees them just as he sees Jesus. Perfect. This still, daily, blows my mind. I don't deserve that. Because I believe in heaven and I believe that I'm going there and yet again, I did nothing to 'earn it'. I'm still a messed up kid whose selfish and unforgiving, etc...
What I've seen in my human life, an undeserved life of westernized privilege (which is extremely rare in the world today considering half the planet lives on $2 a day), I did nothing to deserve it.
What I seen in my spiritual life, an eternity of love and peace and forgiveness, is something that I also don't deserve but it was given to me, for free, through Jesus.
I could have been anything, lived anywhere, in any time period, but I'm here. Now. I am a descendent of those who have come before me. And I get an opportunity to decide what I'm going to with this mist of a life I have on this earth.
That blows my mind.
Sorry if that was a little long, but that's what I've been thinking about...
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Without a doubt, he probably wasn't interested in any of this stuff, and I've definitely convinced all of you to never respond to one of my tweets, but I felt like I needed to type that, if for nothing else, myself. Felt I should throw that out into the world, because that's what I'm thinking about on this Wednesday evening...
140 characters be damned.
