All of Life…a Trade?
I came accross this article that my good friend Tim Burkholder wrote. Smart man, Tim is. That’s probably why I was able to get through college…ha ha. Anyways, I hope you find it as intriguing as I did.
All of Life…a Trade? By Tim Burkholder
IT WAS SIX WEEKS BEFORE the sessions with my career counselor provided anything tangible. “You’ll never be able to accomplish what you want, in the manner you want,” the counselor said to me, a confused freshman. “Life is a series of seasons, and you will have to choose wisely the things you desire during each season.” My counselor then pulled a note card out of his desk drawer and quickly scribbled some words down. He handed me the card and verbalized the words on it: ‘All of Life is a Trade,’ he said. At the time, I just scoffed at this man who was three times my age and in youthful naïveté, knew I could accomplish anything I wanted.
Truth can sometimes be a funny thing. Jesus says (in John 8:32) that “truth contains the power to set you free.” The converse of that implies that untruth holds the power to shackle us. At the time I was meeting with my counselor, I would have said that lies are the untruth that enslave us; little did I know that a small piece of paper set me off on a journey to prove that hypothesis to be only half true.
Over the next several years, that note card sat on my desk and those six words unknowingly became my credo. Aſter all, the man was a nationally esteemed professional counselor, how could he lead me astray? All of life is a trade. This message rooted so deeply in my mind that every decision I encountered soon passed through a personal economics filter; complete with supply and demand curves, opportunity cost calculations, and risk mitigation strategies. Every decision became an automatic, deliberate choice against every other possibility. Ordering pizza meant not eating burgers or barbeque. Dating Sarah forfeited the opportunity to know Jessica or Jill. A degree in engineering was a choice against literature, arts, and education.
“Choose wisely,” my counselor had said, and the words echoed through the caverns of a young mind searching for truth in the strangest of places. “Life is a series of seasons,” he said and the fall leaves of my life fell. With winter came an inability to make decisions. I was paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, and afraid of missing out on God’s best by choosing instead something just good.
Lies are not the only untruths that ensnare us. Potentially more destructive and harder to spot, half-truths can be just as devastating as outright lies. I recall hearing a speaker a few years ago talk of a half-truth some of Christ’s followers met when reading the truth of (Romans 3:23) “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The problem is not that this is untrue, but that it is not a complete thought. We tend to place a period at the end of that statement, and then miss the point, quite literally. The end of that verse is not a period at all, but a comma. It is absolutely true that we are sinners and we fall short of the glory of God. However, that is not the whole truth. We are sinners, comma, “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). There is not much hope if we miss the second half of that truth.
That is exactly the problem with a half-truth. It is believable. It is hopeless. It is easy to recognize we are sinners, short of the glory of God, and to continue becoming enslaved in our sin. However, we are not simply sinners. The whole truth is that we were once sinners and we are being transformed into saints through the power of Christ’s redemption. We are justified freely, and the full truth of that sets us free.
While my counselor’s six words of advice may have been somewhat true, they are absolutely not the whole truth. Life as a series of tradeoffs is not freeing. If we only make correct decisions, then there is no room for mistakes, for failure or for risk. However, there is also no room for grace. We were not created to be paralyzed by the fear of mistakes and wrong decisions, but to embrace the mystery of the unknown, the wonders of the truth and the grace of the gospel. Life may be a trade, but grace is always there alongside us.
As I ripped up the half-truth on the 3×5 note card, I tried to think of what words might replace the ones that had held me in captivity for so long. Perhaps all of life is a giſt, or maybe even an adventure. It certainly is a mystery. Who would ever think that a true statement could be as harmful as a lie? Jesus holds the truth that sets us free. Be cautious of truth that doesn’t lead to life. If the truth you believe is enslaving, take a closer look. Chances are, there is a second half to that truth which incorporates the Grace and Redemption of our Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace.