Precious Life
Luke 12:13-21
According to calculations made by insurance companies in the somewhat ghoulish work of determining an amount that is acceptable to settle on when someone has died, there are very mathmatic factors that seem to come into play.
They estimate the future earnings over a life time.
They subtract living expenses from those earnings
They determine the amount of time the family needs the lost “monetary value” represented in the previous two points.
They apply a discount rate from the above rates for reasons I am not complely sure about.
(I got this info from an article on “Insurance & Estates”)
I think we have a big cultural (and moral) problem when it comes to how we understand the value of life. In some conversations, (especially in politics) we tend to relegate the value of life rather easily into numbers. Numbers of dollars, numbers of deaths, statistics that we really aren’t fully comprehending but use as the foundation of a moral choice inherent in a policy that needs to be passed.
And we also try to “add value” to our lives by seeking to earn more wealth or become more “beautiful” by whatever standards are at large on social media. Seeking beauty has reached levels of absurdity in skin care practices, including people in their 20s getting “baby botox” treatments to mitigate future wrinkles on their faces they fear they will have to manage.
In the version of capitalism we seem stuck with, life feels a whole lot like a race to grab onto and hoard as much as you can. Whether its money, youth, possessions… and the “american dream” is to strive for a lifestyle that the vast majority of people only achieve because of wealth they have inherited or no small amount of luck rather than the amount of effort and hustle they put into working for it.
We hoard abundance for ourselves and cling desperately to a fear of scarcity. I think the social media phenomenon we seem so affected by as a society has a large part to play in a lot of this, but I also think we are hard wired to do this as well. It’s a survival mechanism and stress response that forgets a fundamental truth: our lives are actually better when our neighbor’s lives are better too.
And there is another truth that I find compelling to name as a Christian: the value of our life in God’s eyes cannot be described with a number. Quantifying something as precious as this “one wild and precious life” we have all been blessed to have only cheapens it.
The hard work for us as Christians and also as humans is to not let the enormity of tragedy or the sterility of incomprehensible statistics dilute how precious we understand every single human life to be—whether its a billionaire’s or a palestinian child’s.
