Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a word that described their life perfectly? One word that in its vast array of meanings and connotations summed up an entire existence succinctly and neatly, tying up all loose ends?
But, as author John Green puts it, the truth defies simplicity, and to say that telling the truth of my life in one phoneme is simplistic, well, that is an understatement of biblical proportions. But for the sake of testing the waters, for the sake of seeing how far we can break down a story until it resembles only a pile of literary devices, I would venture that the single word to describe my life is “relinquish.”
It had been my goal for some time to be the self-made man. My favorite quote growing up “I don’t like to lose.” I’m not making this up. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (still one of my all-time favorite movies), Captain James T. Kirk recounts his days as a cadet at Starfleet Academy, and how he reprogrammed a training simulation so that he could beat it.
The point of the Kobayashi Maru training exercise was to test the resolve and steeliness of a cadet in command in a scenario where victory was impossible. Simply put, there was no way to win it, so the cadet was faced with the prospect of certain death,
Not a particularly pleasant training exercise, if you ask me. I’m glad there was no World Race Kobayashi Maru.
But Kirk refused to be party to such inevitability. On his third try, he reprogrammed the simulation so that it was possible to win. “I don’t believe in a no-win scenario,” he would later quip, biting cleverly into an apple mere seconds before flipping open a communicator and brilliantly orchestrating his and his shipmates’ liberation from the jaws of a lifetime spent locked underground on a dead planet.
I wanted to be like Kirk. I wanted to do everything myself, to reprogram the simulation so that I could snatch victory away from a life hell bent on handing me toil and strife all my days. But as hard as I tried, I could never get it right. I could never keep the proverbial Klingon battle cruisers from destroying my ship. I just wasn’t good enough.
And that is a problem I faced head on during training camp, and continue to battle this very second: am I good enough? Am I clever enough? Can I make it by myself? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no. But the negative answer in God’s Kingdom is different than that of the world.
The world tells me “Of course you’re not good enough. How could you ever think that you could get ahead? You’re too short, too small, too slow, too dull, too whatever to get ahead in this world. Enjoy your inevitable failure.”
But God tells me, “My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in weakness.”
During training camp, I kept getting this image of God as a young man visiting a pound and stooping into a pen full of puppies. I’m one of those puppies, and how blessed and excited am I to look up and see a tall, olive-skinned man, grinning from ear to ear, eyes bright, reaching toward me with strong, calloused hands attached to forearms rippling with veins. They pick me up under my arms, and the smiling man tells me, “I choose you.”
And when I relinquish my dream of being self-made, my desire to win every contest, my pathological need to do everything myself, I can bask in the full meaning of those words: “I choose you.”
And to give up and be chosen is so much more beautiful than any simulation I could have reprogrammed.
