Getting Busy Living

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”
–Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.

We live in an age of cynicism, negativity and sarcasm. In recent years, a research project sought to determine the frequency of negative words versus positive words in two different languages—Spanish and English. Overwhelmingly, when asked to respond to a variety of controlled experiences, the subjects chose far more negative words to describe their perceptions than positive ones. We are drawn to the negative. And the affect of this negativity is profound. Psychologists tell us as well that a person needs numerous positive words to overcome the scars of just one negative word in his development.

Finding hope in the seemingly hopeless valleys of life, however, is not only pleasant and healthy, but is the key to a joyful and thriving life. In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, a lifer named Red has spent his entire adult life in prison. Parole review after parole review passes Red by, and he has resigned himself to a life of incarceration. But his good friend, Andy, scores big by engineering a clever escape. Andy leaves a note for Red instructing him what to do if he gains his own freedom. Red finally gets paroled, and is directed by Andy’s note to a secluded, hidden treasure, containing the following note:

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”
–Andy Dufresne

So, Red realizes he has a choice to make–he can either get busy living or get busy dying. He can wallow in the sorrow of a life wasted in prison. He can nurse a bitter root of resentment against the prison, the guards, the system. He can broil in hatred and resentment toward God for the cruel blow he has suffered. Or, he can decide in his heart to live in the gratitude of his newly-found freedom.

Author Joni Erickson Tada made a similar choice. It was 1967, Joni was a young active, beautiful teenager. Her whole vibrant life in front of her, Joni’s life forever changed one summer afternoon when she dove into a body of water and broke her neck. A quadriplegic. Since then, she has gone to author over thirty inspirational books and become a talented artist, painting with a brush in her mouth. But Joni Erickson Tada’s positive attitude did not just “happen.”

After her diving accident, while in the hospital, she had to endure in the ensuing weeks long and grueling surgeries to try and correct her problem. For three weeks, she had to lie face down in what was called a stryker frame– three hours face up, followed by three hours face down– three weeks of this. Staring at either the ceiling or the floor for hours on end, you can imagine, her thoughts went to hopelessness, anger, and despair. “God, I’m never going to trust you again,” she thought. She wanted no visitors, lashed out at the nurses, and said she justified it all because few people have ever been asked to endure this. In her book, Hope, The Best of Things, she writes that she knew her attitude stunk and that it was not pleasing to God, but she justified it, domesticated it, made her attitude her right and pet privilege.

But just when things couldn’t get any worse, she thought, God intervened for Joni.
Here is what she writes…

“So God gave me some help. About one week into that three-week stint of lying facedown, staring at the floor, waiting for my back to heal, I got hit with a bad case of the flu. And suddenly, not being able to move was peanuts compared to not being able to breathe. I was claustrophobic. I was suffering. I was gasping for breath. I could not move. All was hopeless. All was gone. I was falling backward, head over heels, down for the count, decimated…. That week a friend came to see me in the hospital while I was still face-down counting the tiles. She put a bible on the little stool in front of me, and stuck my mouth stick in my mouth so I could flip its pages, and she asked me to turn to Psalm 18. There, I read, “In my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help. From His temple He heard my voice, and my cry to Him reached His ears. …He took me and rescued me, BECAUSE HE DELIGHTED IN ME…. Now don’t be fooled—that was no isolated incident. I didn’t just leave my desperation back there in the hospital. No, desperation is part of a quadriplegic’s life each and every day. For me, suffering is still that jackhammer breaking apart my rocks of resistance every day. …And it happens almost every morning. Please know I am no expert at this wheelchair thing. I’m no professional at being a quadriplegic.”

Joni Erickson Tada goes on to say that, for her, the truly handicapped people in our world are not those in wheelchairs and dialysis, but those who live normal, yet thankless lives. The truly handicapped are those who operate on an ungrateful and demanding autopilot, living as though each breath and blessing is an expected right. Let’s make the choice with Joni to get busy living…

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Freedom From, or Freedom For…

“I stand at the altar of Almighty God, with hatred against any form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
–Thomas Jefferson, etched into the ceiling of the Jefferson Memorial.

Recently, my wife and I had the distinct privilege of taking our children on a vacation to Washington D.C. Inspired by the history, deeply moved by the monuments, humbled by the sacrifices made by so many to secure our freedoms, we will never forget the experience. In the Jefferson Memorial, we stood amazed at the grandeur and profundity of the place and its significance—for our country and for all of us who are privileged to be Americans. These passionate ideas springing from the pen of Thomas Jefferson set ablaze not only the hearts of our founding fathers, but also inspired other nations as well with the life-changing vision of true freedom for all people. We soaked in the gravity of these words while in the rotunda of the Monument.

Upon entering the gift shop in the basement of the Memorial, however, I overheard a discussion between two people that made my heart sink. They both agreed that they had discovered the most glaring example of tyranny over the mind—religion! In their view, it is religion that is the most cruel form of tyranny over the mind of man, and that Jefferson was standing passionately against organized religion; that it is religion that is the great evil and opponent of freedom and its oppressive nature that makes separation of church and state a necessity in the mind of Thomas Jefferson. The discussion, I believe, reveals much about our culture today.

On the one hand, the current feeling in our culture is that religion is oppressive. I know this to be true in some forms of its expression. Throughout history, religious fervor can be expressed in ways that stifle joy, inquiry, and heart freedom. Judgmental attitudes, arbitrary rules applied without grace, and unforgiving attitudes have made the religious experience of some a tyranny over the mind and heart. However, this is not the sole sin of religious institutions. Over the years, I have seen oppression and tyranny take many forms, both secular and religious. Educational institutions, political entities, corporations, governments—all of them can become tyrannical. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson would have opposed religious tyranny—but not religious tyranny alone.

On the other hand, I have experienced forms of religious expression that are wonderfully freeing, empowering, inspiring, and life-changing for the good of others. I have found the message of Jesus Christ to be freeing in this way. Jefferson realized that religious belief, properly expressed, is a great fountain of good. His own heart was stirred by a belief in God that gave substance to his passions. Notice in the above quote his reference to standing at the “altar of Almighty God.” Further, consider the following quotes from Jefferson:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”
–Notes on the State of Virginia, etched in the Jefferson Memorial.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
–The Declaration of Independence.

For Jefferson, his belief in God, though expressed differently than my own, was central to his belief in personal freedoms and rights. Thomas Jefferson was a staunch Deist, who believed in a distant, impersonal, and uninvolved God. Jefferson was very much a child of the Enlightenment view of God. Nonetheless, to say Jefferson was unreligious or antireligious would be a mockery of his personal beliefs. His convictions about personal, universal freedoms and rights were anchored in the concept of their being installed by our Creator. The divine origin of these rights is what made them unalterable and self-evident for Jefferson. In other words, it was as though Jefferson was warning, “No person or government should mess with what God Almighty has created in the heart of humanity.” I am NOT saying that we should require all people to have a belief in God (such a posture would be the tyranny against which Jefferson warned). What I AM saying is that freedom to worship God and respect for such religious belief are the overflow of Jefferson’s ideal.

Thomas Jefferson was deeply passionate about freedom. But it was not freedom from religion, but freedom for religion. His goal was not to eradicate religion. One need only consider figures like William Wilberforce in England or Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to know that positive religious belief motivated some profound and good changes in the world. The reason Thomas Jefferson wanted religion and state to be separate was to protect religion from state coercion or control. Indeed, I too passionately stand against all forms of tyranny, religious or otherwise. But let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater where religious belief is concerned (thinking religious belief is inherently oppressive), rather let us show respect for passionate religious belief expressed in love as a harbinger of profound human advancement.

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