I Don’t Envy You, Mr. Businessman

In eighth grade Career Investigations class, I decided who I wanted to become. Scratch the childish dreams of being a teacher and author. My new ambition was to work in a tall office building with my own cubicle and a lap top, daily donning a skirt suit and taking coffee breaks. For some reason I romanticized that image that to me exuded importance, sophistication, success.

The last time I was in an airport I found myself seated near one such image of success. He wore a fine-looking, well-fitting suit and polished shoes. He referred to the sleek laptop  he had removed from its costly leather case as he spoke confidently to the imaginary colleague in his ear, content to allow anyone to hear about the pressing business matters he had to attend to.

I once might have looked at him with envy. Not him per se, but what he symbolized, which probably would have been better represented in the form of a girl with a frilly shirt, pointy shoes, and a roll of drawings tucked under her arm.

Instead, I looked at him with pity. He thinks he has found purpose in life by contributing, by earning, by having so much necessary business to do. And maybe he has; maybe he was wired to do that. But I looked at him with thankfulness, because for me, his would be a life of emptiness and monotony, a life without soul and passion.

I don’t envy you, Mr. Businessman.

I’m not sure my definition of a significant life was ever sincerely the metropolitan business-oriented one. After all, everyone knows that success for the Southern girl means graduating from college, tying the knot, and starting a family. When I turned in my Five Year Goals to my senior design professor they certainly evidenced little career ambition, and yet pushing a stroller and walking a dog did not seem like enough adventure for me.

My life is extraordinary, it is fun, it is fulfilling. Like any situation on earth it demands a lot of sacrifices, requiring me on the not-so-fun days to recount its abundant rewards. But I honestly had little difficulty leaving the comforts and conveniences behind when I chose this route.

And yet I still long for pieces of my old, normal life. I remind myself about the grass always being greener, that everything has its pro’s and con’s, and how I have the rest of my life to live the typical American dream. But I can’t shake the longing for chilly runs with crunchy fall leaves beneath my feet, for a shelf-full of books and more to be had just down the street, for colorful cardigans and feminine skirts, for a stroll through a glass-encapsuled modern museum, for the sound of Fur Elise under my fingers, for chocolate chip cookies served on hand-painted dishes, for an architectural scene scribbled in my sketchbook, for a 26.2 mile race in an unexplored city, for planting flowers in Spring and gathering wood in Fall, for quaint brick cottages with manicured lawns, for a liberating drive amidst pastures of wildflowers, for tomato soup and the smell of homemade (bread-maker) bread.

For twenty-three years I’ve gathered these scraps of memories and passions that I thought made me who I am or would lead me to who I would become. Then, in one year of leaving them thousands of miles away, I constructed a whole new meaning to the question of identity that answers in español. With half of me here and half of me there I am part stranger no matter where I go, leading me to doubt that anyone can fully know and understand me, save the One who created this multi-faceted being. My heart is split in two, torn by the nostalgia of the past and the thrills of the present, and I’m not sure how to fix it wholly in one place. I find it running beneath Fall foliage in East Texas, yet singing, “Cantaré de tu amor, rendiré mi corazón ante ti; tu serás mi pasión y mis pasos seguirán por tu voz, mi Jesús y mi Rey.” Is it not possible to have the best of both worlds or must I always resign to lack part of my soul and passion wherever I am? Or is it that what I thought I loved was just ease and comfort- only a shadow of the true life and joy that I have now experienced even amidst trial and discomfort- and that going back to it would leave me feeling emptier than ever before?

Maybe I do envy the businessman. He is satisfied with the surface appearance of a good life, with world-defined success. I am not. I’m longing for even more life, an even deeper abundance, and, having sampled society’s trusted prescriptions, I’m certain it can only be gained through Christ.

This might all sound flowery and ambiguous or critical and overanalyzed, but the heart of it is that come June I will find myself at a great fork in the road that will require some amount of loss and sacrifice regardless of what I choose. I fear that the path I will take will be away from a place where I found myself and where the people around me became family. And yet, if it is God’s plan, can’t I rest in the assurance that it will not mean settling on something, but rather be immeasurably more that I could imagine?

One cannot be a disciple of Christ without forfeiting things normally sought in human life, and that one who pays little in the world’s coinage to bear his name has reason to wonder where he or she stands with God. But the cost of nondiscipleship is far greater – even when this life alone is considered – than the price paid to walk with Jesus.

Nondiscipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10). The cross-shaped yoke of Christ is after all an instrument of liberation and power to those who live in it with him and learn the meekness and lowliness of heart that brings rest to the soul… The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane.

-Dallas Willard (The Spirit of the Disciplines)