In most of the United States there is a policy of checking on any stalled vehicle on the highway when temperatures drop to single digits or below. About 3:00 am one very cold morning, Montana State Trooper Allan Nixon responded to a call about a car that was off the shoulder of the road outside Great Falls, Montana. He located the car, stuck in deep snow but with the engine still running.
Pulling in behind the car with his emergency lights on, the trooper walked to the driver's door to find an older man passed out behind the wheel with a nearly empty vodka bottle on the seat beside him. The driver woke up when the trooper tapped on the window. Seeing the rotating lights in his rearview mirror, and the state trooper standing next to his car, the man panicked. He jerked the gearshift into "drive" and hit the gas.
The car's speedometer was showing 20, 30, 40, and then 50 MPH, but it was still stuck in the snow, wheels spinning. The trooper having a sense of humor, began running in place next to the speeding (but stationary) car. The driver totally freaked out, thinking the trooper was actually keeping up with him. This went on for another 30 seconds before the trooper yelled, "PULL OVER!" The man nodded, turned his wheel, and stopped the engine. Needless to say, the man from North Dakota was arrested and is probably still shaking his head over the state trooper in Montana who could run 50 miles per hour.
"Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?" (Psalm 139:7).
Have you ever felt like Sisyphus?
"Like who?!" you ask.
Like Sisyphus, the mythological king who's lust for life caused him to try to trick the gods by cheating death. The gods responded to this treachery by sentencing him to Hades, condemning him to endlessly roll a huge bolder up a hill, only to have it roll down again.
Students of ancient Greek mythology, philosophy and psychology have for centuries studied this tragic character, searching for insight into the human condition. The famed existentialist writer, Albert Camus, had this to say about Sisyphus' odd lot in life (or should we say "death"):
"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. … Sisyphus' scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which his whole being was exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth."
Surely we can all relate to Sisyphus to some degree or another. Without the right perspective, life can feel like "futile and hopeless labor"--endlessly rolling a giant boulder up a hill, only to have it roll right back down again. The lesson seems to be that we can't subvert the purposes of the God's and hope to be productive. That is the condition of all who "scorn" God, who fail to face their own mortality, who are enslaved to the "passions" of this world. Futility is indeed the "price that must be paid for the passions of this world."
But those who love God, who see death as the gateway to everlasting life, who's passions are for the Lord, will find satisfaction in all their labors.
"Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58).