futility is a time issue

on waste, Camus, and redemption from the curse

The futility of most things is found in its relationship to time. Futility cannot exist outside of time, as infinity, whether in bliss or torture, is perfected in either way. Perfection does not allow for inefficiencies. I believe the definition of futility in its fullest and truest sense is a mismanagement of the life and time God has given to each of us.

As finite beings, even though we have infinite souls, our flesh being finite has an impact on our soul’s desires — yearning for the futility of the finite when it needs to fight against the grain to desire the infinite, eternal things that are actually good.

We are moving towards infinity no matter what we do. But the question is what wages we gain on the journey. We are all moving along a time continuum, figuring out how we need to conduct ourselves, how to achieve our desires, discover what our desires are, and what impacts those things. And more times than not, we opt for futility.

I think about the lyric in “All is for Your Glory,” where Steffany Gretzinger sings, “For You alone will be exalted in that day, and worthless goals will be exposed as idols that we’ve made.” We see the yearning for futility across the globe.

Abandoning communion with God or even walking away from Him altogether to build a career or make a name for ourselves, as if He hasn’t already called us by name. Striving to make a business venture work, or spending all of your time to build it in hopes of collecting a wage, King Solomon reconciled that you could very well die and leave it to someone else anyway.

In the gossip we partake in to destroy another person to make ourselves feel better for a few minutes. In the affair, looking for fleeting pleasure and newness instead of cultivating what’s already there and eternally valuable. See also that futility is felt in both the short and the long term, both now and later.

What you think happens at the end of life informs your way of living — in futility or non-futility. Hence, branches of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism. Hope plays a notable role in this. We see life by counting up. We say what our age is in regard to hoping there is another year.

Both hope and hopelessness are powerful in their own ways and can drive a soul to fruitfulness or futility. If nothing waits at the end, why steward what you have now? This is why what you believe about eternity is not a theological cope, or something loose and abstract, but practical. It shapes every decision made along the time continuum, every wage collected, and every desire we pursue or abandon.

Philosophers such as Camus focus on the short term, as in this life. What he misses is eternity. I think if he had believed in it and not seen belief in religion as escapism, but rather as the informing framework and guide for eternal fruitfulness, gaining a true belief in Christ and eternity might have challenged his view of absurdism.

He might have grasped onto the hope of how life in Christ removes the hopelessness of a futile life and catapulted him straight into a meaningful, eternal life that starts with making choices that actively fight against futility on the earth, and reap reward in an eternally non-futile life.

No longer living to the fullest because futility is a threat, but because it no longer remains one.

In Romans 8, Paul explains how humanity was subjected to futility, but also says that we look forward in hope toward Christ. Also in the futility conversation is King Solomon, and he and Paul have an interesting discussion between the Old and New Testaments.

Solomon was right that under the sun, everything expires. Wisdom, pleasure, legacy, labor, it’s all a vapor, as he says. Futility in this finite realm is the default condition of a life lived within time—again, it is a time issue. So, the only way out is to look toward and live within Someone eternal, outside of time.

That is what life in Christ actually is. To walk in the freedom from the curse of futility. To choose well, and for it to all mean something in the end.

I disagree with Camus’s notion that this belief is escapism, a cope, or a means for moral improvement, but rather the hope of humanity to live outside of the curse of futility in the fruitfulness of God.

With love,

Rebecca