“(We) are… caught up in our autobiographies. We are fully invested in our own over-scheduled lives. And we have made it difficult to retreat from these driven lives because we have come to construe them as normal.”
– John B. Hayes
Mr. Hayes is right. In fact, he’s seriously insightful. I can’t deny that the whole of my life has very much been concentrated on the scripting of my life. So far my wife and I have filled a volume. Do you want to know what it says? Here’s the back-cover summary:
“We have been pursuing the Western ideal ever since we could remember. It’s a promising quest. Start with a career. We wanted to be artists! Since “artist” is an umbrella term, we tried everything: writer, songwriter, singer, sculptor, musician, painter, graphic artist, dancer, choreographer, designer, director, producer, play writer, poet. Some success followed. But neither of us made the cover of People Magazine.
We moved on to steady jobs with benefits, followed of course by a couple of houses, a couple of kids, a couple of cars, a couple of Macs, a modern kitchen with stainless steal appliances, a bathroom with a soaker tub, a skylight, pot lights on dimmers, and hardwood throughout. Next, put the kids in a great school. Collect some art as we go, make some sound financial investments, and then focus on healthy eating. HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) be damned!
Then we had our Christian duties to fulfill: go to church, volunteer, be kind to others, give some money away, that sort of thing.
The whole book, one chapter after another, we imagined that what we were writing was “normal.” This is what people do! And so it was, we filled the pages of our lives with the Western script of the status quo.”
And man did we fill the pages!
But herein lay the ruse. For we quickly became too busy to ever even consider a different way of living…
But, what if we did?
What if we stopped for a moment?
What if we began asking “what if?” more often? Like, what if we began to question why we do things, how we do things, and for whom we do things? What if we wanted to live differently? What if we wanted to invest in different things? What if the status quo was a dead end? What if we wanted to explore the options? Ya, this examining-our-lives-thing feels right. In fact, the more questions we ask, the greater our hunger grows for answers. The more curious we become.
And so here we are. Question-askers. No answers yet; but we are not deterred! For we are taking the question-asking process very seriously. Questions must be asked slowly, over time. They must be birthed from contemplation, examination, conversation, prayer and meditation. If we rush into the questions, we miss the point. For you can quickly become a question-asker, but ask irrelevant, trivial questions.
Why are we here? What is the purpose of our lives? Where did we come from and where are we going? What legacy do we want to leave behind? What do we want to invest in? These are relevant questions.
As we go I will share with you all the relevant questions and conversations we have engaged in the last 3 years. The sum of these is where we are now, and what we know needs to happen next:
Erase the script we have written. Take the most important thing we have – our family – and start again with a blank page.
A blank page...
And when the page is empty, we will go out to find the answers. If God is the reason we are here, and we believe He is, let Him be the author of our lives. Our prayer is that He will write on the pages we will give Him.
We hope you will join us.
Welcome to the Blank Page Revival.
