This is Worse than Losing Everything

Losing everything isn’t the worst thing that can happen. Everything losing you can be much worse.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is fed up with the hardships and unfairness of life, and he thinks if he ends his participation in it things will get better. He even speculates that if he’d never been born, things would have been better for everyone. But when he’s given the frightening gift of seeing just that, he comes to realize that his often-overlooked impact was a crucial good to his family, his community, and even the world.

George learned that him losing everything wasn’t nearly as catastrophic as everything losing him. We need to learn it, too.

It’s perhaps not so dramatic for most of us. But many of us do a Volunteer George Bailey and we quiet quit our callings in the world. We withdraw from family and community and church—from life. We may not have the same moral rationale as George does, but we have the same desperate broken heart that cries out for us to quit. We spend a lot of time in despair about how life is happening to us in ways we hate, and we don’t think enough about how it could change if we started happening to life.

Our first father Adam was passive when his wife, and the world, was under attack from a dragon. He let it happen. That was very bad. Passivity has always been a scourge, and threatens us with often-less-obvious but nevertheless-still-devastating destruction. Its evil twin, Tyranny, gets more headlines. But Passivity will hollow out the inside of the castle while Tyranny blazes away outside the walls against a massed army of eager defenders.

Passivity is not the way. We need to happen to life.

Despair is a sin. As Gandalf sagely says in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King: “Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt, and we do not.”

Despair is an arrogant certainty that we know what comes next. It is pretended sovereignty and a kind of soft arrogance and quiet cowardice combined. How do I know? Because it’s tempting to me.

Like George Bailey, I was born old. I was world-weary before it was cool, and I feel things keenly and deeply. I always have. The safest thing for me is to pack it in, and protect myself. Of course, I have to be discerning and not be a fool. I can’t spend all my energy fighting every battle all the time. But I do want to show up to the callings I’ve clearly been given. I need to do more than let the world hurt me, I got to get some punches in on the world. (The world as in “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”)

I can’t just let the world happen to me. I’ve got to be a happening dude.

You might, like George, fail to see how important your presence is. Not your half-hearted, self-centered presence, but you and your gifts as a way to love and serve others.

One example is artists who give up on the Church because of ________ (insert the million reasons we can feel rejected and hurt). But despair is not the answer. You need your fellow Christians and they need you. Don’t be the hand that says to the eye, “I don’t need you.” That ain’t the way. The Church needs you, yes.

They don’t need an arrogant, apostate fool who’s convinced everything in fashion is also what’s important for the Church to wake up and embrace. They need a humble, servant-hearted artist who feels things deeply and has gifts and insights aimed at serving the faithful and the world and upholding the Faith.

There are lots of cliches, like, “keep on keeping on,” and, “keep calm and carry on,” and, “stay the course,” and, “hang in there,” and, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” There are many more. Why do we need so many of these? Because we are fragile. We are jars of clay. Clay is brittle, and breaking hurts. But the treasure is inside us, and so we’ve got to risk it.

I’m trying to save your life. Be present. Be a gift. We need you. Losing everything is not so bad for you as everything losing you.

Show up and give your life away. The Lord said that’s the only way to save it.

And it’s worth saving. It’s wonderful.

I’m on your side,

Sam

P.S. Middle Grade March continues! Here are the staff’s picks for middle grade books. Read to see why we recommend The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt, Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus, and more!

Publisher (and brother-in-law), Andrew Mackay, recommends more allies in the middle grade space such as Read Aloud Revival, Redeemed Reader, and more.

And here you can enter the GIVEAWAY (on socials | on website) to receive the physical copies of our favorite books.