Defending Your Life
While on break at home, I’ve joined Netflix and my parents and I have started watching movies in the long queue I’ve set up. We started with “The Devil Wears Prada,” which reminded me a lot of “Ugly Betty.” Then we watched “Defending Your Life,” a film about what happens after we die.
Basically, the movie assumes that after we die on Earth, we go to Judgment City. There, celestial lawyers argue before judges who decide whether or not we deserve to move on to the next world. During each person’s “trial,” scenes from their lives that are recorded on Earth, are replayed in Judgment City, then proffered by the lawyers as exhibits of evidence. The judges then base their decision of whether a person should move on or be sent back to Earth to re-live life on the degree to which the person’s life was governed by fear.
Without saying much about the bit about fear, I’ll just focus on the whole concept of each moment of our lives being recorded. Any viewer of this film will become acutely aware of the consequences of such a concept, and it really made me question the way I spend my moments, my days, my months, my years.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I work pretty hard. But even I’ll admit that starting from junior year of college, and slowly through my three years in law school, I’ve grown more and more relaxed. I have taken myself out of certain competitive positions, have (at times) mastered the art of saying “no” – perhaps to a fault – and have altogether become less ambitious. I have mixed feelings about whether this is a good or bad thing.
On one hand, I think that it’s good to have ambition. Especially if you have been given talents, interests, resources, and opportunities–that’s a combination that not everyone has been gifted with…so the person who finds that under the Christmas tree should be a good steward and maximize whatever results that can deliver. On the other hand, I feel like that kind of “good” ambition can often morph into something awful, and corrupt one’s character and morals and displace priorities until right seems wrong and wrong seems right.
As a result of fear of the latter, I have conducted my law school years with something I’d like to call moderation – though now I wonder whether I went too far in that direction and didn’t make the best use of the opportunities I had. I didn’t even try out for the Law Review, reasoning that even if I got in, it wouldn’t really help me get to the U.S. Attorney’s Office anyway – so I might as well not waste my time. I still think I was right about that.
But what of all the other things I did along the way? A ski trip here, a weekend with friends there, movie night here, shopping trip there… I had always reasoned that since I was working hard enough to pull decent grades, that it was more important that I build relationships with the people around me. But where is the balance? Did I spend too much time socializing, and not enough time studying? I wonder whether, in ten/fifteen/twenty years, I will regret some of these decisions and wish that I could redo law school.
I do believe that God can redeem our mistakes. So even if I royally screwed up and closed doors that I should have propped open, I believe that “If God really wants you in Egypt, He will send twelve angry brothers to get you there if He has to” (something my friend Kimberly used to say). Still, we aren’t called to test the Lord God — and we are instead supposed to honor Him with our lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to Him (Romans 12:1-2). So… I’ll need to keep thinking about this. I don’t have an immediate answer.
I am just thinking…if my life ended today and I had to defend it, what would I do? How much could I bring to God and say, “Here’s what I did with my life to bring glory to You”? I know it won’t be nothing, but will it be the product of my very best?