Wasted Lives

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words "waste" and "vast" share a common Latin root. This connection seems to echo in these lines from one of Shelley's poems: "I love all waste / And solitary places; where we taste / The pleasure of believing what we see / Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."

Of course, most of us experience the "waste and solitary places" of our lives with less enthusiasm than Shelley's lines suggest. We know that every hour comes to us only once. And we feel remorse and regret over all the hours -- or days or years -- we have failed to fill. For many of us, life includes a number of these broad and barren landscapes.

Hard winters offer a standing invitation to this sort of reflection. Everywhere the land seems infertile and empty. Wind moves uninterrupted across frozen lakes and past leafeless trees and speaks in lonely groans. A Michigan February provides the perfect stage set for the replaying of troubling scenes from our personal dramas.

So, on the theme of what we might "wish our souls to be," it may console us to remember how often Jesus rejects the popular opinion that someone has wasted their life. Throughout the gospels, Jesus repeatedly finds hope in lives society decrees hopeless and value in lives society decrees valueless. Jesus meets people in their "waste and solitary places." And, by His presence and through His grace, He brings them to a place where life is full -- and, ah, beautiful paradox, where it is boundless as well.