Saints With Addison BevereSample

The Good Life 

The good life. Isn’t that what we all want?

If the good life could be turned into a product, everyone would want a piece of it. Nothing would be more profitable.

There’s a reason why entire industries (and religions) are built on our dissatisfaction with life. Millions of “life-changing” products fly off assembly lines. We want the good life, and we’re willing to pay for it.

Yet so many of us miss out on life because we’re looking for a better version of what we’ve known.

The good life we all crave is paradoxical—death to find life—and reaches beyond the wisdom of this world. And here’s the reason: God’s not interested in just giving us a better life. He’s not a self-help guru who’s looking to make a quick buck off our nominal improvement. 

God’s in the business of lasting, holistic transformation for the sake of eternal vocation. He has given us a calling, identity, and community that reach beyond the here and now. Our soul longs for this new way of living. It’s too spacious for our world’s temporal fillings. There’s a new life that is found only in the awakening of our True Self.

That’s why the good life isn’t something you find; it’s someone you become.

And it starts here, now. This new life dignifies time, space, and matter, igniting them with purpose. God loves our material world. He calls it good. He celebrates our advances in medicine, science, engineering, teaching, and so on. But there’s more than what we can build with our hands. And in the discovery of this more, our True Self comes alive in hope, promise, and purpose.

In the arms of this new life, you will find the power and perspective to rise above the limitations of your present world and its ideas of goodness.

But here’s the thing—we will not find the good life until we leave our notions of goodness behind us. Paradoxically, once we reject our understanding of the good life, we will find ourselves overcome by new life. As we yield to the magnitude of this new way of being, losing our smallness in God’s largeness, we will become people who participate in the mystery of life.

We will become Saints.