There are only two life forms. If you were to make a bar chart out of them, ranked by number of occurrences, one would be as tall as the Empire State Building and the other as tall as an ant, lying flat on his back, with his legs curled in.
The ant-type life forms are extremely rare—actually there is only one of them. Funny thing is, we all think we are the ant.
The tall bar in our chart is labeled “becoming”, representing all the life forms that are secondary, the result of causes outside their control. The short bar is labeled “being”, representing the life form that exists because it exists, not dependent on anything else.
On average, most Americans in my generation think they are “being.” They are unchanging, absolute, and independent. Which is they we don’t like funerals, absolute truth, being told what to do (authority), or church (authority). And definitely not deep questions about life’s meaning and where we came from.
These concepts are philosophical (which just means they are used for thinking) and debated mainly in religion, the place we go to connect the dots and find answers to our thinking.
In Christian theology the only “being” is God—He is the only self-existent being. Every other life-form had a cause: every man born of a woman, every piece of creation the result of energy changing forms.
He is the sole first cause.
What this means is that outside of God, every life form owes its existence to another life form. We are not islands.
Which means, unless we created ourselves, we are not independent, the product of our own creative wills. We were made, as a product of the hand of God, of parents, and of a million miracles that birthed us, made us, and hold us together.
Which means we are not our own. We belong to our Maker, because our very existence is due to His activity in the molecular level, long before we existed.
Which also means we are always in flux, always changing, never coming to a conclusive status of “being.”
And this gets to the point of what it means to be human, to be “becoming.”
We have two options: we either become ourselves, or become who we were born to be.
There’s a great documentary about David Foster Wallace, arguably the greatest American writer of the 21st century, called “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.”
If you know Wallace you know what this means. He saw himself an ant, and he ended his life early because he stopped becoming and expected to be “being.”
Wallace did not know God, so the other option wasn’t an option for him. Becoming who we were born to be starts with listening to our Maker and changing, day by day, into the image He has for us.
Like Aragorn, in Lord of the Rings, we are all called to be something significant, a king, a queen, or a prince of our little world.
And like Aragorn, we fight against it; we want to be something else, a ranger, successful, wealthy, independent, powerful, esteemed, and it takes us a long time to yield to it, and become it.
One day, Elrond confronts him: “Put aside the ranger and become who you were born to be.”
You’ve got to become something, so become yourself, or become who you were born to be.
The choice is yours.