Quite Profound

I'm currently tick-boxing my way through one of those "Thousand Things To Do Before You Die" lists. And provided my life is long enough I think I might just get through this list of must-hear albums. I've already heard half of them so that leaves about five hundred to go, which should take about three weeks and cost me £5,000 - unless I get the music illegally, which I'm not going to do because that will disqualify me from achieving another one of my life goals: namely to live a pure and spotless life.
It feels there's a new 'life list' being published every day. As well as the albums we must hear or the places we must visit, there are the goals - the big sky-diving, climb-Everest goals - that we must set ourselves if we are to feel that we are people truly living life. And if we're not sure what our goals should be there are plenty of people dying to share their lists with us. A current glance at social networking sites will show you that sky-diving is the 24th most popular life goal, with losing weight at number one.
Three things seem to attract us to these lists: a desire to get hold of something good, a lack of time to choose what is good, and a concern that we are not achieving enough in life. According to the proponents of these lists, they are perfect for productively anxious professionals who have no time to embark on spiritual quests. They provide us with a kind of short cut to meaningful achievement and self-fulfilment. But is setting personal goals and achieving them going to bring fulfilment and peace or will we - like the addicted consumer- be left with a nagging sense of there being something else - some other goal that maybe can't be reduced to a grocery list; a goal that isn't about self-fulfilment and that requires us to find and choose what is good?
In another age, a busy, anxious professional asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. By way of answer Jesus referred to a well-known 'life list', one made up of things we shouldn't as well as should do. The man proudly replied 'check' to each one of the commandments and yet suspected there was more. So he asked what he still lacked. Jesus' answer wasn't "go memorise the Torah" or "white water raft the Jordan" - but "go sell your possessions, and follow me". It was a goal way too challenging for the man and we are told he went away sad and, presumably, unfulfilled. The man was expecting a 'things to do before you die' list; what he got was a 'die first then discover your life' list.
A preacher I knew used to ask people "Hey, how's life going?" After they'd given their usually glib answer he'd say, with a smile, "do yourself a favour and die", before adding quietly - "to yourself, that is!" It was a serious jest, another way of saying if you really want to live a fulfilling, abundant life then you must lose it first in order to find it.
Rhidian Brook