There is nothing worse than what “ought to be.”  So much agony in this life is wrapped up in the little word “if.”

I’ve been thinking for the past several weeks about my tendency to revisit places in my past and wonder at what could have been and should have been.  This is despite my near constant assertion to anyone who will listen that I really am content with my life.  So far as I can tell from the objective and subjective pieces of my life, I AM actually content and I really like my life, its struggles notwithstanding.  So what gives with the “what-ifs?”

I’m convinced that it’s a malady common to all humanity, regardless of our individual state–happy or otherwise.  One of the drawbacks to being human is being bounded by the constraints of linear time.  We get one pass through, and each decision we make limits the next set of decisions with which we are presented.  You choose to eat soup for lunch, and that means that you don’t eat a cheeseburger.  You choose to spend time with one friend and not another, and a few weeks later, you’re like complete strangers.  And on it goes.   Worse, we know it’s happening while we’re living it.

Almost everywhere I go, the lure of potential is before me. Pick up anything which contains articles about sports, for example, and you’ll discover it is rare to get through an article without it somehow addressing the issues of potential.  Between injuries and the way the ball bounces, there are a multitude of ways in which any single game could turn out drastically differently, not to mention seasons or the careers of those who play professionally.  In the last 30 years in the sporting world, there has been new and enormous attention paid to the drafting processes by which teams select players.  The drafts for the major professional leagues are now a near holiday in some quarters, with resources springing up so people can devote time to become amateur judges of an athlete’s potential. (Don’t believe me?  Check out the pages of any sports website.  The day after the recent completion of the NFL regular season, one prominent sports website featured an entire series of articles on what the teams who did not make the playoffs needed to do to improve, which is actually TWO potentiality exercises happening at once!)  In the world of literature, we lament about authors who write a single great work and are subsequently never head from again.  Musical composers, painters and sculptors who died young are accorded a melancholy sense of awed respect, but in the next breath is always the question of what could’ve been.

Perhaps no where is this mindset more obvious than the cultural mindset surrounding those whose lives expire before we expect.  I am not here to dispute that there is a special brand of grief and sadness that surrounds the death of someone young.  I have had the unfortunate experience of grieving with parents who have lost young children, and I hope to never have it again.  By the time I turned 20, I had already carried a box holding the remains of a friend around my age.  But the kinds of things people say about such passings are revealing, and I think strike at the heart of all of our worship of potential. (Some of the most provocative arguments against both abortion and euthanasia are at their essence, potentiality arguments–that we ought not snuff out potential.  Of course, such arguments are also impossible to prove, but that does not shake them of all of their power, which only demonstrates how core these potentiality questions are.)

At the core of all of these statements and what-ifs is a central theme:  that what has happened represents an injustice or a reversal of the expected and assumed order of things. It’s not fair!  Everyone is entitled to a long life.  Everyone ought to completely maximize their potential, either for their own good, or for ours.  Those who are most gifted ought to be the most willing to be selfless to contribute the fruits of their abilities to those around them.  The people we give affection to ought to return it.  And once again, on the list goes.  We really believe in these unspoken rules of what everyone deserves, and we grieve when they do not prove out in the lives of those around us.

The problem is that these rules to which we refer are an illusion.

There is no world accessible by us where everyone will be guaranteed to be allotted their 68.7 years.  There is no world we can reach where everyone we love will love us back in exactly the way we need to be loved.  There is no world where everyone reaches their potential.  It is a fairy land.  A myth.  A lie.  And we believe it, sometimes beyond all reason.

I think this ties up in our core brokenness as humans.  As the philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “…what a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!”  We are great because we understand greatness, but the refuse because we cannot attain it, however great our accomplishments.  We know what we should be, and we are desperately avoiding the conclusion that we will never reach it.  Ultimately, all our offerings to the idol of potentiality amount to a denial of our own sin and its consequences.  Because all humanity has strayed, all of us are captive in a system where the options which lead to us being everything we were meant to be are not available to us.  We can’t fully find the love and acceptance we crave.  We can’t achieve what we think we should be able to.  And at some point when the hubris wears off, we are confronted with that realization.

Again, this would be pretty depressing if that was all.  Happily, it’s not.  We need not offer up endless offerings at the altar of potential.  Instead, we can worship the One who was everything man was supposed to be–Jesus Christ himself.  He took on human form and all that meant, and then lived perfectly in the flesh.  He lived the life we couldn’t to secure the future we couldn’t, a future where our human frailties are refined out of us and we can be what we were always intended to be.  Anyone who is in Christ is in the process of being refined in this way, being made into the likeness of Christ, the one who actually capitalized on the maximum amount of potential it is possible to have by being simultaneously God and man.

We do not have to worry after our what-ifs if God is directing our steps.  We can know and affirm that no matter our past, and no matter our abilities, we are becoming what we were always meant to be.  Even if our past is filled with things we wish had gone differently, we do not have to have any doubt about the good things that God has wrought out of them.  In case of life, give up sacrificing to the altar of potential, and rely on the one who was, and is, and is to come.

Meanwhile, I’ll be praying that God takes the bitter out of some of my bittersweet memories, and yours as well.