The Big Three

Aaron Isley

One’s “Call,” “Salvation,” and “Christian Living” are all essential factors to any believer’s life. However, I would go so far as to say that even non-believers, though they would deny it, either aloof to the fact, or naming it something else, are infinitely affected by knowing or not knowing their raison d’être or calling; having a task or mission, no matter how self-serving, which gives them worth, legacy, or salvation from purposelessness; and a lifestyle that best facilitates establishing this legacy and fulfilling goals.

What I have always found most interesting is that not only the unbeliever who successfully or unsuccessfully pursues his dreams but also the so-called Christian who denies one or all three of these essential factors in life ends up in the same unfilled and depressed state. The image depicted in T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” comes immediately to mind.

Everyone, independent of age, sex, or culture, responds to a need for Calling, divine or not, Salvation, which may be nothing greater than a sense of self-worth by rising above trials and tribulations, and Christian Living or a self-fulfilling lifestyle. These would establish these “Big Three” which are at the core of what it is to be human.

The Big Three are so intimately related, the neglect of one surely affects the state of the other two. For me, the “Big Three” were much more clearly defined and pursuable, yet somewhere along the way I strayed from them. In my case it was the self-removal from and the avoidance of Christian fellowship and community, an integral part of Christian Living, that led me to losing my calling and my sense of direction. My eyes could no longer see nor could my ears hear the direction of the Lord. Without direction I had no worthy purpose to justify my efforts until finally I questioned my very salvation as I knew not what of my self even existed to be saved. I had become a hollow man, a tumbleweed, an aimless drifter in the wind. Existence blew through me until, like an empty cave caught by the night breeze, my insides howled despair and utter loneliness. I turned to intimacy, money-making, knowledge; I exercised just to experience the sensation of feeling alive, and to anger for fuel, but despite my greatest efforts I was deeply unsatisfied. Like a tree who had once drunk from the freshest river of life, I had now sunk my roots in the driest sands of non-existence, and no matter how much I tried to convince myself of the joys I was receiving from attaining “intimacy,” “security,” “power,” “sensation,” or “fuel” I knew I would never be sated.

After tasting the fruits of absolute truth, power, and love who can find satisfaction in the wind-driven dusts of human folly? Try as I did my soul, my passion had begun to dissipate like a rotting carcass in stagnant water. Ironically, the reasons I had left “Christian community”—their moribund witness, their shallow love, their lack of commitment to action—were the very pitfalls I had now become guilty of myself.

I began to search for a Christian community that God would use to nourish me, a fellowship . . . and here I now am at the Trinity Forum Academy listening to my call, rediscovering my salvation, and reinstituting Christian living into my everyday life.

Aaron Isley graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics. Aaron wrote his honors thesis on Linguistic Phenomena in Cults. Born into a missionary family, Aaron lived in Portugal as a child and went to high school in Costa Rica. Aaron’s paternal side hails from Indiana and his mother is from Anguilla. Aaron’s interests lie in social psychology and the study of group dynamics, conflict resolution, and conflict prevention.

0 Responses • Fellows, Tue 10 Oct 2006