If you want to live your life on a higher plane, become a Hindu.
If you are seeking an ordered, disciplined life, and wish to be a person of high morals, become a Muslim or a Jew.
If it is pleasure you seek, go for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
If you are seeking protection from all the bad things that can happen, try Shinto or one of the spiritist religions that promise to teach you to evoke or appease the spirits through burning incense, talismans, or charms.
What Christ offers you is the opportunity to live your life as a servant to others. A life of sacrifice, giving up your own pleasure, career, success, wealth, and leisure to become a slave to helping other people who are suffering. Not to help just the wealthy or persons of high social standing, (although they suffer too), but to help people who are unworthy, who others classify as worthless.
And then, as you begin to let go of the material things you prize so much, as you let go of your pride, your successes, your accomplishments, you will find inner peace and tranquility. And as you shape a new life, with new definitions of what it means to succeed in terms of lives saved and suffering soothed, you will find yourself living on a higher plane. You will discover that the highest morality is the morality that lets us get out of ourselves, our traditions, and our culture, and view the world from another's point of view. The greatest pleasure is that shared with an abandoned child you have helped to rescue, or with the heartfelt thanks from a hurting one you have helped to heal.
But in all of this, God does not promise protection from the bad things that can happen. Missionaries to leper colonies have always and frequently contracted leprosy. Persons reaching out to AIDS victims risk contracting AIDS. Persons working with the homeless often get lice. God does not promise an easy road. Christ merely told us to go.
Copyright © 1996 Steve Falkenberg