Something Amazing... Someday

I love Calvin and Hobbes. It’s unquestionably one of the ‘heck yes, mother’ funniest comic strips of all dang time. There’s a one-panel cartoon of Calvin that wasn’t in the comic strip continuity that I’ve always found eerily insightful. It reads ‘They say God puts us on the earth to accomplish specific tasks. At this rate, I’ll never die.’ While certainly not the funniest thing ever to tumble out from the character’s two-dimensional lips, I’ve always wondered about the point that it may or may not have been trying to make.

I have borne the name Christian for pretty much my whole cognoscente life. Unworthily I have bragged to those who would listen that Jesus was on my side. I accomplished this through word of mouth and preposterous t-shirts that attacked the beholder. To bear another’s name, as Christians must of Christ, is to align yourself with that name and ally yourself with He who holds it. Much as a bride takes the name of her groom, we must relinquish that which we hold onto and answer evermore to the call of Christian. I have brandished this name both passively and aggressively and missed the mark of doing so lovingly. What have I done of worth with the name? I cannot see anything. If I was really meant to silently sit and hold onto the name I took, affecting no one, what difference would it have made if I had dropped dead upon confessing the name of Jesus? It would have made no difference. Since God did not do that, and has instead allowed oxygen to routinely fill my lungs, I can only surmise that there is still something He will have me do. I have a mission and I know it because I am alive and I know the truth. I’m gonna rock way hard someday and then I’m just gonna groove on it like it ain’t no thing.
studentweb.anderson.edu/~rrwolfgang
-Ryan