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If Jesus resurrected, then you can find purpose in the small and mundane.
“They have forgotten what it means to really live.” Leonard, De Niro’s character, was in an unresponsive, catatonic state and awoke for a brief time 25+ years later.
The 1990 film called Awakenings is based on Dr. Oliver Sacks’ 1973 memoir.
Leonard was relearning what it means to exist when he realized how so many perceive life so negatively. Leonard said, “They’ve forgotten how good it is.”
Malcolm, Robin Williams’ character portraying Dr. Sacks, experimented with the drug L-Dopa to “awaken” catatonic patients. It worked. Leonard was the first person Malcolm “awoke.”
But only for a brief while. All the patients went back into catatonia.
Malcolm later explained, “…as the chemical window closed, another awakening took place; that the human spirit is more powerful than any drug and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter. This is what we’d forgotten, the simplest things.”
The substance of life is in work, play, friendship, and family.
But it is only through the small and mundane that we can cultivate these simplest of things.
From movies we think life is lived from one climactic moment to another, from one big opportunity to the next, or from radical decision to radical decision. Wrong.
Life is less sexy and more complicated. Most of life could not capture our attention on the big screen. So we do not cultivate these simplest of things by not tending the small things.
Small things don’t feel significant.
Marriages go awry, friendships dwindle, work grows stale, and play is numbing rather than nourishing.
When Jesus resurrected, he renewed the human vocation God intended: to commune with God and to live through work, play, family, and friendships.
From his resurrection, we learn that the mundane actually captures God’s attention and that it is for these simplest of things we were made.
So though your small act of buying lunch, playing a board game, or listening to someone vent may not feel significant, it is. Such is life.
Eventually, the world will be renewed and life with it. But the substance of life will not change. In the new earth, there will be work, play, family, and friendships.
By embracing Jesus’ resurrection life, you embrace the good life as it is meant to be.
So you can be attentive to the little things and take yourself off autopilot. Life matters. Your choices matter. You matter.
The resurrection proves it.
Thanks,
Aaron