Love Is the Adventure

 

When I was a child, my family often vacationed in the Seattle area, where most of my mom’s side of the family lived. Growing up in the topographically meager Illinois, I was enthralled by the hills and mountains that stretched out all around the city. My uncles took me and my brother and our cousins for hikes, and I bounded up the mossy paths, whapping the huge ferns with a stick while misting rain filtered through the Douglas firs. The payoff for our exertions was a summit view that cascaded for miles with snowy Mount Rainier in the distance, or sometimes even a thundering waterfall. Every hike was an adventure.

In my adult life, I still find myself in the flatlands of Illinois most days of the year. That sense of adventure and bright-eyed wonder can be hard to come by. But it only takes a quiet moment to stoke my longing for adventure. Remembering the mountains stirs my soul with an almost painful desire for wildness. Yet as I type these words from my comfortable home office, the most wild-adjacent thing is my (thoroughly domesticated) cat meowing for attention on the other side of the door.

 

The Not-So-Adventerous Work Day

It’s become a trope of our suburbanized culture to bemoan the contrast between a boring, predictable life of cubicles, timesheets, and 401(k)s and the thrills of risking it all in some grand venture. Just think of Bob Parr’s cramped desk in The Incredibles:

 

 

Like Bob, we chafe at the constraints of a desaturated working world and wonder if a bright red super suit might be waiting for us somewhere. Unlike Bob, we do not have superpowers and probably need to keep the job we have.

Notice what Bob is doing, too: Lifelessly staring at a computer screen. Is there anything less wild than a digital screen? It compresses the world into the comfort of a device we control, allowing us to pause or click away or change the volume whenever we want to. Reality is not so: We discover who we are by testing ourselves against rocks that don’t budge, immersing ourselves in unpredictable environments until we can navigate them, finding our rhythm in the current of events that don’t answer to our whims. Our longing for adventure is a longing to exercise agency in the movements of a world greater than ourselves where real things happen.

But with the equally real pressures of adult life in the digital world, is there any way back to that kind of adventure? In the routines of humdrum work, can we honor the longing we feel for something more—for wilds worth exploring, risks worth taking, and mountains worth climbing?

There is. We can find our way back to the life we were meant to live. And I don’t just mean getting out there in the natural world as a weekend warrior (although that probably wouldn’t hurt if you get the chance). No, Jesus offers us a way into the adventurous life right where we are, in the jobs that we have. As he leads us, we discover that love is the adventure commensurate with our longings for agency, meaning, and significance.

 

“Because They Are Hard”

Before looking at the Bible’s teaching on love, let’s consider: What is adventure? Why do we long for it? President John F. Kennedy once contemplated this question as he rallied the nation to the adventure of putting human beings on the moon: “But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? . . . We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . .”

Adventure is not easy; it is hard. It is, by nature, uncomfortable. Bilbo must leave his hobbit hole and “his second breakfast half-finished” to join Thorin’s Company. Jonah must brave the city of the pagans to (eventually) obey his prophetic call. Sojourner Truth must travel light, taking only “a few articles of clothing in a pillow-case” to go where the Spirit leads her to prophesy against slavery.

But like these adventurers, we weather the discomforts and unpredictabilities of adventure because it is worth it for what we achieve in the end. There is some meaning in the adventure itself, even if it is simply the meaning of proving ourselves against the challenge, that outweighs what we suffer for it. If we did not suffer at all for it, if it was easy, then the journey would be drained of its meaning. We choose to do the things that adventure requires because they are hard.

 

A Strange Love Story

Love, as it turns out, can also be hard.

The Bible’s teaching on love sometimes comes in the form of love stories—including some rather strange ones. One such story arrives in Genesis, where we read the account of Jacob’s fraught dealings with his deceitful uncle Laban. In the patriarchal setting of the ancient world, Jacob has to render some kind of payment to his uncle in order to marry Rachel, Laban’s daughter. Not having stored wealth, Jacob hires himself out: “Jacob loved Rachel. And he said [to Laban], ‘I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel’” (Genesis 29:18 ESV). (As modern readers, we hope Rachel had some say in this matter and is not being treated like chattel. As reverent readers, let’s let the text speak to us about love on its own terms.)

As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Laban is not planning to honor the arrangement as agreed upon, but before we get that far, there’s this lovely little verse about Jacob’s experience of those seven years: “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her” (Genesis 29:20 ESV). Love changed what the work felt like to Jacob. His motivation made the time fly by, perhaps in what psychologists now call a “flow state.”

Jacob is wily in his own right and certainly conscious of how to do well for himself (see a later chapter for his wealth-building via sneaky husbandry tactics). But in these first seven years of work for Laban, he is motivated by something other than raw self-interest. He is motivated by Rachel. Love draws him beyond himself and transcends the normal drudgery of work.

 

Moving Beyond Ourselves

There’s a spiritual lesson here for us here, if we’re willing to receive it. Our experience of work is not just colored by what the work is, but also by why we do it. If we do the work only for ourselves, to get ahead, we’ll kick against its boredoms and pains. After all, if I’m doing the job for me, why should I have to suffer? But if we do the work for someone or something beyond ourselves, we’ll find the grit we need to endure those boredoms and pains.

This way that love can change work is one instance of the Bible’s larger counterintuitive picture of love. Jesus teaches about love in terms of the sacrifices it requires. Why would someone lay down their life? Jesus says, for their friends: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12-13 ESV). You can’t lay down your life to get ahead; it’s a contradiction in terms. But you can lay down your life for the people you love. You can move beyond yourself.

 

Is It Worth It?

We might think that this kind of self-sacrifice is noble, but best to avoid if possible. But Jesus has a different take on it. In his teaching and in the Scriptures as a whole, experiencing suffering for the sake of love is constantly associated with the most desirable joys. In the same discourse where Jesus calls his disciples to lay down their lives for each other, he says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11 NIV). The writer of Hebrews says that Jesus himself “endured the cross” for “the joy that was set before him” (12:2 ESV). Peter writes that those who suffer for Jesus’ sake discover “an inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Peter 1:8 NIV). 

In other words, in the biblical vision, you miss out if you don’t get to suffer for love. That’s why the apostles could walk home after a flogging “rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41 NIV). It is hard for us to wrap our minds around rejoicing after physical torture. But the love that Jesus draws us into is just as deep as whatever sacrifice it requires. When we live in his love, we find that it is strong enough to redeem suffering. Whatever we give up for love is worth it. In the end, the joy outweighs the pain.

 

Adventure In Unadventurous Circumstances

This vision of death-defying love brings us back to the idea of adventure in the doldrums of work. If love can redeem suffering, it can also redeem toil.

Love gives us something unexpected: the possibility of adventure in unadventurous circumstances. Think about what makes adventure what it is: Risk, pain, and unpredictability, all undertaken for the sake of some end that makes it worth it, that renders it meaningful. Now consider the Bible’s teaching on love: laying down your life for someone or something beyond yourself, and in that suffering discovering an unspeakable joy. Adventure and love hit the same beats. They follow the same rhythm. Love is the adventure that Jesus leads us into.

Like Jacob, your work can be transformed when you do it for someone you love. It could be the family you’re providing for, or the customers you’re serving, or the coworkers you’re collaborating with, or the community your organization helps. When you do your job, whatever it is, with a heart to genuinely work for the good of those around you, you’re climbing the mountain. You’re exercising agency in the movements of a world greater than yourself where real things happen.

For some workers of course, physical adventure is part of the job: First responders, astronauts, scuba divers, helicopter pilots, and many others endure literal danger every day. But what is physically true for them can be spiritually true for all of us. As literacy champion and modern mystic Frank C. Laubach once wrote, “undiscovered continents of spiritual living“ await any of us who are willing to explore them.

 

Boredom, Pain, and Love

Ironically, the very same aspects that make our jobs seem unadventurous at first can become the contours of the adventure of love. Is your job boring? The pain of the monotony is a sacrifice you can make for love. Instead of boredom, full stop, love transforms tedium into boredom-that’s-worth-it, ennobling even the most mundane or menial tasks. Just before going to the cross in the greatest adventure of cosmic history, Jesus took time to wash twelve disciples’ dirty feet. He did it for the joy set before him.

Is your job a place of real suffering, a place that feels more like death than life? For as long as that’s the place you have to be, Jesus is with you there, and he can teach you to lay down your life for your friends, for your family, for your customers, for your colleagues, for your community. It doesn’t have to be pointless pain. The injustice you face is the dragonfire you’re facing down; the scarring workload is the river you’re fording on the way to the fortress; the long hours are the battlefield where you’re defending the hope of the kingdom.

 

Becoming Ourselves

In an adventure, we prove ourselves against the challenge. But, more precisely stated, we become ourselves against the challenge. We are not static, as though an adventure is a test that only shows what is already true about us. We are dynamic, and find ourselves changed through the experience of the adventure itself. Bilbo returns to Bag End not merely as a hobbit, but also as a burglar of dragon’s gold. Jacob, in loving Rachel, becomes a patriarch.

When we step into the adventure of love, it doesn’t just dignify our daily work. It changes us. Jesus can take the stuff of the job, whatever it is—the punchclock and the paperwork, the Slack updates and meetings-that-could-have-been-an-email, the sore shoulders and hoarse voice—and use it to make us into the adventurers he always intended for us to be. The kind of people who fight dragons and scale mountains and speak truth to power, who find joy in the trials and keep the faith and help others hold onto hope, who love God and love people day in and day out regardless of how unimpressive or unadventurous another day of work might seem.

So today, do your work with love. It’s an adventure!

 

 

Image by User:Deathgleaner from Wikimedia Commons

Subscribe to get our next post in your inbox.

Support Mission Central.