The Game of Life
Thursday, September 13, 2007
The typical life-story, the way it is “supposed” to go, involves childhood, teenage years, college, starting a career, getting married, having children, mid-life, and retirement. More or less that is the accepted sequence, at least in the middle-class world in which I grew up. The Game of Life certainly laid it out this way, with a few options like whether or not to go to college.
It is life as defined by its “stages” using sociological/anthropological terms. Three aspects of human existence are typically incorporated in this description: the process of maturation of the individual (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age), the role of the individual in family (child, adult child, spouse, parent, grandparent), and the individual’s participation in the workforce.
What does it look like to think of life primarily in terms of how we relate to God, and the topography of a spiritual journey? I suspect that many believers are still imagining the flow of life with respect to maturation, family, and work. Life is typically mapped out by these signposts, but should we be looking at life differently?
Perhaps we see ourselves moving through these stages instead of a progression within the Kingdom of God and what that might suggest that we ought to expect and look forward to. What would it mean for our expectation for the flow of life to be defined with God at the center rather than the chronology and stages of human experiences to be the essential milestones?
