crisis of significance

Where do we find significance? Do we find it or is it given to us?

The following video argues that we find significance in ourselves when we are able to integrate all of our lives into one self, breaking down the barriers we place between “work-life”, “home-life”, “friend-life”, “___-life”, and breaking down the barriers that we have placed between us and the other.

Watch the video (it’s only about 6 minutes) and I’ll give some thoughts after.

This is a very humanist approach to the problem. If we would only realise how we are all connected, then we will be able to (re)create this space where we are all living in harmony.

I realise that the breaking down of barriers can only be good, as he says, but I think this will not come by “reintegrating our selves”. This will only come when we choose to give up ourselves for the sake of the others.

When we die to ourselves.

Only when we ignore the call of the world, and that desire within, to think only of ourselves will we be able to live this new life that thinks of others as our equal. I think this is what Jesus was talking about when he said we needed to die to ourselves.

The defining moment in the Bible is the death and resurrection of Jesus, the man from Nazareth. The whole story before it leads up to it, and the whole story after that event tries to figure out the significance of it.

Jesus’s death brings life.

And not just life for him, but life for us as well, because in Jesus’s death he broke the bonds of all those things that lead us away from one another and from God. Jesus said that he came to give life,

life to the full.

How many times have you wondered if there was more to life? How many times have you sat in your room on a rainy day and questioned the meaning of your existence? How many times have you kinda stood outside yourself, looked around and said, “Is this all there is?”

The guy in the youtube video nails the problem on the head, we no longer know if we are significant to anyone (even ourselves). The answer, however, is not to claim our significance by uniting our disparate selves (those pieces of us we show to others depending on our location and context).

The answer is to see ourselves in Jesus.

It is only in dying to ourselves that we see God and others.

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