The Now and the Know

For those of you who don’t know, I am one die-hard Green Bay Packers fan. I love football, both NCAA and the NFL and I am currently engaging in ridiculous amounts of draft analysis to feed my addiction. Anyway, one of my friends, who is aware of this addiction, walked up to me recently and asked, “So Petey, do you think he’ll stay retired?” He was talking about Brett Favre, who had announced his retirement for the second (?) time a few days prior.

For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s what happened. Favre spent 16 years as the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. He broke a lot of records while he was there and was loved by Packer nation. Prior to the start of the last season, Brett announced his retirement following the Pack’s 13-3 season that came one game short of the Superbowl. A lot of things happened over the next couple of months, but a few weeks before training camp was supposed to begin, rumors started flying that Favre wanted to come back. Rumors became fact and soon Brett was on a plane headed to Green Bay. He left just as quickly, though, and was later traded to the New York Jets. That’s an abbreviated version of the story, but I think it will suffice for our purposes.

What’s the point I want to make with Brett? It’s this: Favre un-retired for a reason. It wasn’t money, he’s done very well for himself over his long career. It wasn’t the lack of accomplishments; Favre holds a spot in every major passing record book and is number one if a few of them, plus he’s got a Superbowl ring. No, Favre’s return can be boiled down to one sentence: I know I can still play this game. He said it a number of times in press conferences, but in retrospect what he was really saying was, “I don’t know what to do when I’m not playing this game.”

In The Search for Purpose Part One, I explored the human need to know who we are and the ways we manipulate and change God to support our own narcissism. I ended by saying that only God gives true purpose, something I plan to explore further in Part Three. Donald Miller sums this up better than I would in his book Searching for God Knows What:

… I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone. And it wasn’t just me. I could see it in the people on television, I could see it in the people in the movies, I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley McLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did. (44)

What happens when God, the “thing” that is supposed to make us feel good or valuable, is gone? Well, allow me to clarify, when it appears to be gone. God never actual leaves us, but we often attempt to ignore God’s presence. What happens is we ascribe meaning to things that have none. I think perhaps the best way to understand this is to think back to middle school. I wouldn’t normally ask anyone to do that, because if your middle school experience was anything like mine it probably isn’t too worth remembering or thinking about all that often. But still, remember Trapper Keepers? Anyone? No one said it, but everyone knew it: it mattered what kind of binder you carried all your stuff in. The more pockets, the more absurdly large, the better! When it came time to get out your binder in class on the very first day, you knew you were about to make a social statement about who you were and what you were about. And the whole time you were eying the people around you, hoping to confirm that your binder was, in fact, the best one.

That might sound a little heavy handed, but that’s part of my point. At that age we didn’t know any better, but we were ascribing meaning, taking our sense of value, from something that was meaningless, that gave nothing. This is what happens when God is seemingly out of the picture. And when we can’t take our value or purpose from God, we will take it from others. Without God, I am only as valuable as the people around me say I am. As Donald Miller explains in the aforementioned Searching for God Knows What,we start existing as though we are in a lifeboat:

The thing is, if people are in a lifeboat, the reason they feel passionate about being a good person and all is because if they aren’t, they are going to be thrown overboard; they are going to be killed. I realize that sounds grim, but I kept comparing, in my mind, the conversation that might take place in a lifeboat with the conversations I heard at Palio or at Horse Brass. Because when you really think about it, these wants we have, like wanting to be right, wanting to be good, wanting to be perceived as humble, wanting to be important to people and wanting to be loved, feel perilous, as though by not getting them something terrible is going to happen. (106)

Without God I am only as valuable as people tell me I am, so I’d better get people to think I’m valuable. Facebook, Twitter and the like are all tools we use to project an image, to help us stay in the boat. Without God, there is nothing more than self-preservation. And the real problem with taking of value from, among other things, Trapper Keepers is that they are finite. Eventually, the Trapper Keeper will be gone and if all of my sense of value, my identity is wrapped up in that Trapper Keeper then I have no idea who I am or what to do now that it’s gone. That’s exactly what I think happened with Favre. He had no reason to return except that he had no idea who he was away from football. And understandably so, that was all he had known his entire life. Insofar as God’s presence profoundly impacts our loves, so too does God’s perceived absence. As Erwin McManus writes in his book Soul Cravings, “Ironically, even if you do not believe in God, your life may be more shaped by your lack of relationship to Him than any other relationship in your life.” (Entry 18) Our lives will be greatly impacted when we try and live them without God because we will be forced to grant meaning where there is none. We will look for what which cannot be found anywhere or in anyone other than God.

When we try and live life without God we will constantly be searching for something but never finding it. As McManus writes:

You will spend your life working through relationships trying to understand your need for love, your inadequacies in love, your desperation for love, and all the time you might miss the signs that your heart is giving you, that you’re searching for God.

A life without God will eventually lead to all of us feeling like Brett Favre. Eventually that thing that we thought was fulfilling God’s role, that we thought was giving us value, will pass away. We won’t be able to play the game any more. We won’t be able to work, to do the job the same way we used to. And we will find ourselves saying, “I have no idea who I am or what I’m supposed to be about.”

Do you know what you mean to God?