Alan Ball, creator of True Blood, the new vampire series on HBO, was interviewed today by Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air. One thing he said interested me. Vampires, you know, supposedly have eternal life. Ball said, and I hope that I’m quoting him accurately: “If you have eternal life, each day becomes less important. Everything you have, you lose.”
Maybe Ball has identified part of why people don’t follow Jesus Christ. Christ promises eternal life, a state of timelessness lived in the presence of God, to all who follow Him. But in a timebound world, which inevitably limits our imaginations, we may not want to take Him up on the offer. That's because it’s easier to keep score, to quantify friends, relationships, possessions, income in a realm limited by time. In a timebound world, we have things we don’t want to lose.
Eternity renders those things irrelevant. It pushes us and our desperate attempts to conquer, to manage, to be in control away from the centers of our perceptions and daily life. Everything you have, you lose.
But in losing all the things that we use to describe "really living," at least by the lights of this world, we gain everything. We are no longer defined or controlled by the things we have, own, control, or label. In taking Christ’s offer of eternity, we are made simply ourselves, children of God, created in God's image, free to live in the now moments of this world and in the eternal now as the people God, our designer and redeemer, made us to be.
That’s scary. It entails ceding control and leaving behind our usual means of measuring the value of our lives, whether it's others or we ourselves do the measuring.
It’s also liberating. An unquantified and unquantifiable life is a blank slate on which we are free to live as fully human beings in the place where our deepest, purest desires and God’s design, both of the universe and of ourselves individually, meet.
This is what Jesus Christ offers us when He tells us to believe in Him and follow. He makes each day of this life more important, not less so, because through Christ, we gain the confidence that no risk we take is ultimately fatal and we learn that in us, eternity with all its patience and assurance, not only invades today, but also has its start today.
This isn't easy. Every day, I come face to face with ways in which I don't believe, the ways in which I allow my horizons to be limited by a time-and-space-trapped world. But in those moments when I put down my dukes and let eternity slip past my defenses, there is joy and hope. And I feel sorry for and pray for people like Alan Ball.
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