Live Alive

Life Is Not Trivial

By John Piper July 13, 1980

Isn't it the extremely high and the extremely low occasions of life that trigger in us a hunger that life not be so trivial most of the time? Every human being now and then feels a longing that life not dribble away like a leaky faucet. You've all tasted the desire that day-to-day life be more than a series of trifles. It can happen when you are reading a poem, when you are kneeling in your closet, when you are standing at the lakeside at sunset. It very often happens at birth and death.

When my mother died in December, 1974, I had to go home and help tend my dad's injury. I didn't know what, besides grief, I might feel. But one thing that happened was this: I wrote to Dr. Glenn, chairman of my department at Bethel College and said: "I know you want me to teach an overload in the spring but unless my job depends on it I'd rather not." The reason I gave was: "When I stand beside my mother's coffin and then look at my wife and son, the $1,000 extra which I would make teaching the overload simply loses all its attraction because it would rob me of some of the quality time with my family." In other words, the crisis time of my mother's death awakened in me a longing that my family life not be trivial.

Why does this happen? I think it's because at these moments of intense emotion we see life for what it really is. The non-essentials get stripped off and life essential shines for what it really is—and it is not trivial. We see things in the light of eternity, we see the way God sees, and triviality has no place in God's life.

The world is hungry for people for whom nothing is trivial, people who ooze with life because in everything they see a reflection of eternity—even in a fish and a blade of grass.

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By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org