The conditions of hopelessness
You're the center of your universe. Your life is all about making you happy. What do you want today? What might entertain you? What might bring you joy even for a moment? What should you eat? What should you wear? What have you been waiting to say to that enemy? What do you require of a friend, today?
None of us would admit that that is our thinking, but it's a belief that is passively held by every one of us. From birth, we possess a self-centered nature. Our very nature resonates on the question's frequency so deeply and so structurally that while none of us would own up to it, we are all always asking, What can I do to satisfy myself in this moment?
This is why the Bible tells us in so many places that we simply must die to self. Our souls are so tuned in to the frequencies of self-centeredness that not a single book in all of the Bible fails to draw contrast between us and God with regard to the sin of pride. We are born worshiping self, seldom denying our selfs every pleasure, seeking to fuel an internal joy engine that's ever running out of steam, pursuing all that might satisfy us moment-by-moment—while, in contrast—God is concretely self-satisfied from the beginning of time. Our self is a self that can't be satisfied, that always wants more. God's self is complete. God has a peace that we lack on our own.
Because we lack satisfaction and completeness and peace, and in an effort to self-satisfy, we spend countless hours of our lives researching where the holes in our joy are and what might plug them. One of the conditions of hopelessness is a bias to self such that, I believe my life's purpose is for me to live and do as I please, all in effort to find joy on my own. When we campaign under the banner of self, we set forth on a path toward despair. Hopelessness is found at the end of a life lived to self.
David Foster Wallace said it best: "Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth."
David Foster Wallace ended up committing suicide and it was such a loss for we who remain. What a brilliant mind, now gone. I don't want to speculate as to why he might have done what he did. We know he was sick. Depression is a horrifying illness. But if I may put forward one possibility: What if DFW reached the end of self—he knew he could no longer satisfy himself with earthly things—but at the end of himself, what if he couldn't see God there? I believe at the end of ourselves, there we find Jesus, with a radically unselfish message about our world. All we have to do is embrace it by dying to self.
You know what I mean when I say 'Death to self,' right? It's a phrase taken from many, many different passages of Scripture, but I'll offer up Galatians 2:20 because it might be the best summation: "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, it is Christ that lives within me." Death to self is a full folding of oneself into Christ such that we stop living and Christ starts living in us. "If any man is in Christ he is a new creation, the old things have past away, behold, all things are being made new."
Christianity is the only religion that teaches that there's nothing you can do on your own to be saved. Judaism teaches that we can reach salvation by keeping a set of laws. Islam teaches the same thing. Buddhism teaches an enlightenment that is deceptively self-centered. "Enlightenment is the end of greed, hatred, and delusion"—that sounds pretty unselfish until we ask, "To what end?" Atheistic attempts at answering the big questions of our universe, like humanism, skepticism, and empiricism all place Man at the center. And don't get me started on the self-centeredness of cults like Scientology or Mormonism.
When we reach hopelessness at the end of ourselves and we develop an existential dread in the pursuit of self, I think that's where the message of Christ is all that can truly lift us from complete despair. Death to self in a life with Christ at the center fuels our joy engine in a way that nothing else can. The truth of Christianity is that there is no conflict between your happiness and God’s glory, when your happiness is in him. King David knew this when he penned, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11).