What Does ‘Better’ Look Like?

It’s easy to say you want things to be better.

It’s easy to say that because if you are asked about your current circumstances, you’ll have a good idea of how things aren’t quite working as you’d like. Thus when asked what you want, you can just reply that you want things to be better. Here in the comfort of a first world country in the environment where a large portion of the population would be stated to be in a middle class income stream ‘better’ can be stated in material terms as well as intangible terms of comfort. The ethos is about wanting to be in a more comfortable position and also desiring that any offspring and other loved ones are also in a comfortable position as measured by financial income and capacity to gain further material goods and other trappings that highlight a comfortable life, like the ability to go abroad for holidays.

An argument suggests that for that to happen, the social and political landscape has to be balanced in such a way to put less of a tax burden on the middle class and incentivise more good jobs to come into the area to further benefit the economy. There must be a sense of safety as the culture works along those financial priorities and the state institutions like schools, police and where relevant hospitals are also properly supported to make the society a better place to live.

For some, that’s what better looks like. It’s a lovely picture for some. The challenge remains, however, that those are largely surface issues to do with material life. It gives the impression that if we improve material conditions it will contribute to the better that you’re looking for. It gives the impression that life is just about the material.

In as much as that’s how we can define what a better life looks like, there’s a lot more to it than that. It is those extra issues that tug at what really prevents an even better picture of what ‘better’ looks like to emerge. The issue, as our hearts truly reveal to us, is not really about the material, it’s about the immaterial, the intangible and the unquantifiable. It’s about attitudes and states of mind. It’s about the reality that life is about values, principles and fundamental beliefs. As we don’t all have the same ones, we think we can leave it to leaders and significant thinkers to arrange the values for us and we’ll all merrily comply and so base our hopes on that. That’s what we think. Even though the glaring evidence around us of that thought proves otherwise, we persist.

So we persist with the fatally flawed model of existence which perpetuates a fatally flawed outcome that doesn’t improve anything because we still haven’t addressed the real issue of what ‘better’ looks like.

That is not, however, to say that such a vision of ‘better’ is non-existent. In fact the vision of better was not only painted and displayed, it was embodied and expressed in a single life that birthed communities and transformed relationships. No effort or need was required to address institutions of that day and indeed this, because it’s inevitable that those who don’t subscribe to the vision will prefer different packaging of what already exists. Yet for those who buy into the vision and the single life that embodied that vision, they can see how the new life breaks through and radically changes this one.

There is a vision of better that is not just sustainable but eternally flourishing … if you want to buy into that.

(Photo by Nicole Harrington on Unsplash)

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden