My life is incredibly routine. Each day feels just like the one before it, probably because it is. I look around me at the bus stop or the grocery store and see all the other people caught up in the mundane routine of life, busying themselves with being busy, just like me.
But how many of us stop to ask ourselves: what’s it all for?
Today, Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, will be providing an answer when he releases his new video series, Creating Your Life Plan. Miller describes it as an “online course that allows you to create a life plan based on Viktor Frankl’s prescription to experience meaning.”
When I first read that two authors I respect were offering a guide to a meaningful life, I was intrigued and hopeful. But after reading this “prescription,” I found myself a little disappointed.
Creating Your Life Plan promotes Frankl’s three step approach to finding meaning in life:
- Have a project you’re working on that requires your unique skills and abilities. (Preferably it’s a project that helps others.)
- Share your experiences within the context of safe, loving relationships.
- Find a redemptive perspective on your suffering and challenges.
What, you ask, could possibly be disappointing about this?
Well, two things:
1. It leaves out the primary source of meaning in our lives: Glorifying our Creator and having relationship with Him.
Miller states that while the videos include small references to his own faith, “there’s no forceful religious content in the course.”
At first, I saw this positively — if people aren’t interested in coming to know Jesus, at least they can learn to have a more fulfilling life. But then C.S. Lewis’ words in the Problem of Pain came to mind:
“God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched.”
There is so much in life that we can deeply enjoy — valuable work, loving relationships, and insightful perspectives — but these things are supposed to point us towards Jesus rather than providing satisfaction apart from Him.
If we were made to know and glorify God, then our lives will only be truly meaningful if they are defined by this calling more than anything else.
2. It is a false dichotomy between meaning and pleasure.
The philosophy of Create Your Life Plan is rooted in Frankl’s idea that “when a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
This was Frankl’s response to Freud’s belief that what humans want most in life is pleasure. I imagine that the pursuit of pleasure both Frankl and Freud were referring to is what Christians would describe as worldly hedonism.
But maybe we think pleasure is separate from meaning because, as C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory, we don’t think of pleasure in the right way:
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Not only does Jesus give infinitely more joy than anything the world can offer, but a relationship with Him is also the intersection of meaning and pleasure.
The steps outlined in Creating Your Life Plan are part of an insightful approach that will certainly enrich the lives of those who follow it. But in and of itself, this strategy to a meaningful life cannot fully deliver what it promises.
I want to have valuable work, good relationships, and insightful perspectives. But above all, I want to seek Jesus daily and experience the joy and meaning only He can give to my life.
Because that’s what it’s all for.
