Lost Things

My desire for more is really a primal desire for God.

Lost things are seldom found, sometimes we don't even know they are lost. The common junk drawer in most houses holds things long forgotten: often duplicated in other places, shelves, cabinets, also unknown and forgotten. It is a funny way of life to accumulate and I have often wondered why we do. Is it only an American thing? A thing for places of plenty? Or is it in the human spirit to hold things close, to imagine it lets us keep our place in this world, until, hopefully before we lose our senses, we see how every material thing so easily clutters the spirit.

Yet I'll not go gnostic, suggesting all is spirit and things are zero. The material does matter, it is good, we should even celebrate it. This is true of the body, profoundly so, but I would argue is no less true of the 17th torque bit I'll never find but is somewhere in the back of that garage-counter drawer. Should I have more than one? I guess not. But I am human, after all, in a human body with a faulty mind. I live in a world that is good and yet needs constant fixing. And I can celebrate the too many tools that help me do that. I can also celebrate too many books that help me love the human spirit, the too many vehicles that tacitly honor the extraordinary ingenuity of the human mind and body, the too much food that speaks the wonder of plenty, not exactly a human blight in itself.

The good and sensible folks who admonish simple living are surely right, and yet accumulating is not some intrinsic sin per se. One can accumulate for the wrong reasons, one can accumulate without direct need, one can even hoard, which seems as much psychological weakness as moral flaw. And when I acknowledge too many tools, books, cars, or food items I suggest there is a line beyond necessity, if not common sense. But is it wrong to have more than necessary? Is having somehow a tainted reality?

Perhaps no one suggests it is, but I sometimes wonder.

I think I can feel the temptation to idolatry of things, to letting any material item be the most important thing in our lives. But pitting things against goodness or God is, to use a dreaded cliche', a false dichotomy, for how can something God gives be wrong to possess per se? All created things are good, and this goes for that which we in our own turn create, when reduced to their essence. Food sustains, cars transport and allow freedom, books reveal and sustain life itself, tools help hold things together. All of this is good!

But what, again, of quantity? How much is too much? I've toyed for years with the idea of owning or committing to (much the same idea) only that which you can manage peacefully and with excellence.

That's a tall order, way taller than me. I've always wanted more of everything though I never thought it wrong. More food, more fun, more friends, more music, more joy and life, more time with my wife, time with my sons, daughter-in-love, and grandson! I want to live forever, I want to ponder everything those book titles suggest, I want to hike the Alcan, travel to Svalbard, fund Alaska Highway adventures, lead a college, build large and enduring buildings, own my own house, live in a cabin by a lake, own a beach cottage. I could go on. And on. 

I'd love to own that idyllic mountain cabin we stayed in when I was a boy, live in and restore life to a dying town in my beloved Kansas, write books both fiction and non-, travel to places unknown and unheard of and ask questions for days of the locals. I want to travel the country and spend time with every family member and far-flung friend I can find -- people like my beloved great-uncle who still stirs the pot at 93 and counting. What could be better than that?! I want to help my sons build their lives, be a world-class husband, have wisdom for the tragedies around the bend, live so heaven would make sense.

I've always been blessed with friends who gently speak sense and peace to me on these points. My beloved wife, soul of common sense, is a gift from God, happy and at peace with the present, with what we have, with enough (or less). And of course I'll do very little of all the more my over-charged soul longs for. But it will always be there, an eternity in my heart, giving clue to all that is beyond.

The great and gifted British author, C. S. Lewis, spoke to it this way: 

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Deep, unquenchable desires for things and places, loves and experiences -- these are a clue to something beyond? Maybe. Maybe that's why we accumulate. We know this world is thin at its most ample, and things become a stand-in for that which we long to have, for that which we hope will never go away.

I think there is a great trade-off that must happen and it is expressed in the words of another great man, Jim Elliot: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."

All the desires of this life find their deepest reality in the eternal. The stuff is good in itself but is only a clue, and will not last. My desire for more is really a primal desire for God. And someday, I dare to believe, I will find it all in Him and be enthralled beyond anything my longings can imagine.