It’s now clear that COVID-19 is a deadly serious global pandemic, and all necessary precautions should be taken. Still, C. S. Lewis’s words—written 72 years ago—ring with some relevance for us. Just replace “atomic bomb” with “coronavirus.”

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948)

You Only Live Once,
What will you do with it?

Everyone has a call, God’s plan for your life.
Everyone answers it one way or another, (will you follow your plan or God’s?

We all graduate from one place in our lives to another. Each graduation calls for more responsibility and if we own that responsibility, it prepares us to bring more Glory to God and benefit to His creation.

Genesis 12:1 Now the LORD had said to Abram, Get you out of your country, and from your kindred, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you: 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless you, and curse him that curses you: and in you shall all families of the earth be blessed. 4 So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken to him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.

Our YOLO Challenge

What is the challenge? From one side, followers of Jesus Christ confront in the modern world the most powerful culture in human history so far, as well as the world’s first truly global culture. This culture has unprecedented power to shape behavior, and its damage to faith has already proved far greater than the malice and destruction of all the Christ-hating persecutors in history, from Nero to Mao Tse Tung

Now is the time to stand and behave as our Lord would wish us to behave. A time to behave is a time to believe as he has taught us to believe. A time to believe is a time to move from small, cozy formulations of faith to knowing what it is to be called by him as the deepest, most stirring, and most consuming passion of our lives.

You only live once, and it doesn’t last.
So live it up. Drink it down. Laugh it off.
Burn it at both ends.
You only live once, and you can’t take it with you.

Those words are a summary of the short-lived YOLO philosophy.

And if we only live once, how are we each to discover a purpose that can make this brief life fully worthwhile, however long or short it turns out to be?

For with so many different perspectives on the search for purpose, the obvious question is, how are we ever to decide between them? And do we have to? Can’t we all just be content with the ways we each have in hand, and hope that everything will turn out all right in the end? Does it really make that much difference which response we choose? Current modern thinking, for example, prides itself on being relativistic, tolerant, and inclusive, which would make any examination of the differences unnecessary. If that sort of thinking is right, we can stop the discussion right here. It really makes no difference that there are differences so long as each of us has his or her own answer, for the answers are all roughly the same in the end. There are no true or false answers, though some may be a little better and some a little worse. After all, that sort of thinking says, the answers are only a matter of “different strokes for different folks.” What matters is that your answer works for you, and my answer works for me.

A little clear thinking, and the plain course of history, would show how faulty and foolish such an attitude is. Certain facts are undeniable. First, there are important differences between the different answers. Second, these differences make an important difference. And third, the differences make an important difference, not only for individuals, but for entire societies and even for civilizations.

A Call To Be Different

Genesis 12:1 Now the LORD had said to Abram, Get you out of your country, and from your kindred, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you: 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless you, and curse him that curses you: and
in you shall all families of the earth be blessed. 4 So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken to him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.

At their very beginning, both Judaism and the Christian faith begin with a call to break and a call to be different, whatever the cost. The first recorded call in the Bible begins with some of the most decisive words in all history. “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household” (Gen.12:1). That command to leave was neither accidental nor temporary. The call of God required of Abraham a radical departure, and it always requires of us a break from anything and everything that invites us to conform to surrounding society, and therefore clashes with the goals and requirements that God has in mind for each of us and for humanity.

God’s call to Abraham was anything but negative. Abraham was not called to a radical asceticism, to a drastic renunciation of the world in the manner of Hindu and Buddhist holy men, or even to be a world-denying Christian monk. The call was gloriously positive. God called Abraham, the father of the faithful, to journey to a new land, the promised land. God called him to become a great nation, the people of God, so that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed. The global dimension of the future was in the very DNA of God’s
call. But before Abraham heard the positive word, he heard the negative. To reach the blessings, Abraham had to make the break. To enter the promised land, he had to leave Haran. To gain the three-fold benefits— children, land, and an influence on all humanity, he was called to part company decisively with three things: country, culture, and kin. The equivalent for us would be the grand social forces of one’s homeland, hometown, and immediate family.

God’s call to Abraham was to a major reversal of the course of human history after the exile from Eden, and that required a decisive and radical break from the way things were. Things in the world had gone from bad to worse since Eden, cresting in the twin disasters of the Flood and the Tower of Babel—the former demonstrating the anarchy of disordered freedom and the latter the arrogance and authoritarianism of illiberal order.

Through this call to break, and the radical reversal it represented, Abraham was to set out on a journey that broke with the three primary forces that shaped who people were, and who we are today—all out of faithfulness to God’s call and its quite different vision of life. From then on Abraham launched out on a journey. He was at home nowhere, and he never conformed to those around him. He broke away from Ur and Haran, where he came from, but never assimilated either in Sodom, which attracted his nephew Lot, or in Canaan, where he pitched his tents. Always and everywhere, he was the “sojourner” and the “stranger” in the lands through which he traveled. At a time when exile from home was often viewed as a judgment worse than death, Abraham followed God’s call and lived his life as what Augustine later called a “resident alien” in the world.

The Jewish story was to be different. Their worship was to be different. Their way of life was to be different. Their conception of time and history was to be different. Their entire stance in history and their way of being in the universe was to be different—all on behalf of restoring what the world was meant to be. They have always been a different people, although not always to the extent that God intended.

The Christian Call

Have we followers of Jesus been as faithful to the call to break and be different? Has this radical call been felt as keenly among Christians as it has been for the Jewish people? Should such a decisive break be any less demanding for Christians? Jesus himself issued his call in terms that are uncompromising. “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

This negative aspect of the call of Jesus is simple, straightforward, and inescapable: When Jesus calls us to follow him, all that contradicts his call, all that contradicts his Lordship over all our lives, has to go. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. We have one Lord, and there must be no rival. We listen to one voice, and all others are secondary. We bow to one authority, and to one only. All other masters, voices, authorities, and influences have their place, but they are lesser, and they must be overruled if they contradict what God has called us to. Like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we, too, are sojourners and strangers, even in our own countries. we are “resident aliens” in this world. We are to be “in” the world, but “not of” it, “not conformed” but “transformed” by the renewing of our minds. we are to be “against the world for the world.”

This call to break is unquestionably challenging. Even a dead body will float downstream, but it takes strength to swim upstream against the flow. Such strength is always easiest to see in times when supreme courage stands out against the surrounding darkness.

Christians have a duty to be different. We can never settle for, “To get along, you have to go along.” As more and more of our Western societies turn away from God, our challenge is to live by a higher law among people who have a lower law or no law at all. The call to break is inherent in God’s call, and it provides a bracing challenge for all who take calling seriously. The maxim of the U.S. Coast Guard reminds us as Christians that
there is no turning back: “When the call [for help] comes, there is a rule that says you have to go. There is no rule that says you have to come back.”

The call to break, as I said, is followed by the promise of blessing, but the negative comes before the positive, and the leaving comes before the entering in.

Have you asked whether you are making the needed break?
Have you examined the shaping power of the social forces around you, its way of life, and its worship of its own special idols? Listen to the commanding invitation of Jesus that is both a call and a charge: “Follow me.”

C. S. Lewis pointed out, “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.” The alternative is the real disaster. “The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.”

Only when we respond to Christ and follow his call do we become our real selves and come to have personalities of our own.

You only live once, how will you prepare for it, what will you do with it?