Not me, you silly goof…

BTW, just in case you are not familiar with the Onion News Network, this is a parody/comedy website. But that doesn’t dismiss the actual thoughts presented in this “dramatization” of a football team falling apart because one member of the team and then eventually the whole team succumbs to despair following an existential epiphany. The comment in the piece that the only choice they have left is suicide reminded me of a comment made by Bart Erhman in his book “God’s Problem.” …

Over the past year I’ve been going through my own “existential epiphany” and one thing that struck me from Erhman’s book was that his lose of Faith made him appreciate all the more the good things that he has in his life. Instead of falling apart because this is all there is to life, he wrote that he feels all the more thankful for every day that he has here and that he feels all the more responsible to do what he can do now to help those less fortunate because this is all we really have.

That’s why I called Erhman a “Voice in the Wilderness” in a previous blog entry, I identified with his faith journey and found some hope that he has made the transition with his sense of purpose intact. And maybe that’s the difference at coming to this place as a teenager/young adult versus dealing with this as a fifty-year-old. Whereas the teenager is going to rage and make a big stink because “everything they told us is a lie,” the 50-year-old is going to feel nostalgic for the connections of those former years but is going to want to focus his energy to have the good constructive connections that are going to make the remaining years of this life “good ones.” So instead of holding up in a locker room and filling pages with rambling scrawls about the injustice of it all, I’d rather go to the local pub with a friend and have a beer and just talk about life. To quote Keith Richards, “I’m happy to be here, hell, I’m happy to be anywhere.

Music: “Ain’t So Easy“ by David and David from their “Boomtown” CD