Every Friday night a little group of us get together to eat some food, read the Bible, share our lives and pray together. We’re a diverse bunch: we’ve got a mathematician in the group, a musician, a lawyer, a public speaker, a legal secretary (who moonlights as an amateur political activist), a children’s book illustrator, and a missionary on furlough from China. We’re all different, but we share faith in Jesus. It’s a lot of fun.
Recently we’ve been reading through the book of Genesis, and on Friday we got to the story about the Tower of Babel (chapter 11). It describes a time when humans thought so highly of themselves that they decided to build a tower to the skies and storm the gates of heaven. God thought he’d remind these little upstarts who was in control, so he confused their languages and scattered them across the earth—ultimately bringing about the wonderful variety of cultures we have today.
What’s most striking about the story is the motive behind the construction plans. The Tower of Babel was attempted, we’re told, because these men and women wanted to ‘make a name’ for themselves. It was this sentence that really got us reflecting.
The eccentric artist Salvidor Dali once said, ‘I’m an exhibitionist. Life is too short to remain unnoticed.’ I think our generation is turning ‘getting noticed’ into an art form. In school we’re taught to promote ourselves; in work we’re told to get our names in the trade journals; thanks to blogsites and YouTube and MySpace we can tell the world who we are and what we’re about. A boy cries into a camera about Britney Spears and gets offered a TV show. A hotel heiress becomes famous simply for being famous. The mood of the times is ‘get noticed’. It’s all about making a name for ourselves.
And yet, reading the story of Babel, I couldn’t help wonder if we’re short-changing ourselves. Because when our lives revolve around getting noticed and ‘making a name’, we reduce life to the tiny speck of dust that we are. God’s world is bigger than us, and that world comes into focus when he is our consuming passion. As the Bible says, ‘Obsession with self… is a dead end; [but] attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life’ (Romans 8:6).
What did that mean for each of us in the room on Friday night—for the musician, the illustrator, the mathematician? How could our lives and careers be rescued from the self-absorbed mission of ‘making a name’ for ourselves? We knew this would be a lifelong discovery but realised the answer began with two words: worship and service. When our lives and careers—our art and mathematics and speaking and illustrating and everything we do—is primarily focussed on worshiping God and serving others, we will be fulfilling our God-given role in life.
God had spoken to many of us on Friday night. We prayed together, said our goodbyes, got into our cars and left to love God and others through our lives and careers, trying anew to turn our backs on the vacuous pursuit of building personal altars to the sky.
© 2007 Sheridan Voysey is a writer, speaker, broadcaster and author of Unseen Footprints: Encountering the divine along the journey of life (Scripture Union, 2005). www.thethoughtfactory.net
