The ‘Life Lie’

When I was doing my first on-call work as a hospital chaplain, I was shadowing one of our more seasoned chaplains, and in the course of our evening he said something that was very profound.  He said, "Hospitals and doctors and medicine don't make people well.  They just delay the inevitable."  He's right.  Everything about us (and life) is wearing down and nothing can stop that.  Our bodies are breaking down.  Our skills wear away.  Everything is wearing down.  But that is a difficult message for many of us to hear.  The reason for this is that we have bought into what playwright Henrik Ibsen once called the "life lie."  Ibsen wrote that if you take away the 'life lie' from the average man you take away his happiness. 

Becky Pippert, author of the book Hope has its Reasons, explained the ‘life lie’ this way.  She writes: There are countless variations on this tale.  I have a friend, a lovely model, whose life is centered in her beauty.  She once told me, "The only bargaining chip I have is my looks.  If that goes there is nothing left."  But what will she do when she loses her beauty when she gets old?  Or perhaps sick?  Another friend tied her happiness to her lover.  When he moved onto someone else, she was devastated and her life crumbled.  These material things are never to serve as a foundation for our lives.  They are at best furnishings.

When the 'life lie' is removed from us, we need to stop and ask, “What IS big enough to build my life upon?  What can I build my life upon that is not a lie?”  For the apostle Paul, there is only one answer to that question.  He tells us in his letter to the Corinthians.  ‘To those who are being renewed day by day, the answer is Christ!’