Ontological Trust Fund Babies

First of all, I’m sooooo sorry that I’ve been away for a while. As I’ve said before, I was taking 7 classes this semester at seminary and I just turned in the bulk of my final papers last week. It has been the most mentally taxing season of my life and I’ve had zero capacity in my small brain for even a blog post these last few weeks. But yesterday, when I hit ‘submit’ for the last paper (well, there are a few more small ones I need to write in the next couple of weeks, but 85% of my work is done), the clouds parted.

Anyhow, as I was up at the coffee shop finishing things up, this thought donned on me…

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In my past life, when I was a club pro at golf courses, I once worked with this guy named Steve. He’d come in twice a week and fix golf clubs. He’d put in maybe 4–5 hours of work per day. And then he’d leave.

But the thing is, he drove a brand new $60,000 Yukon (this was ten years ago when $60k was a lot). I asked him straight-up one day how he could work 10 hours a week (not even having to talk to self-important golfer customers, btw) and drive a Yukon.

“Oh, dude, I’m a trust fund baby,” he said, without skipping a beat. “But the terms of my trust fund are that I have to work at least a part-time job until I’m 50 years old. So here I am.”

He continued, “There are a lot of us out there. If you go to a coffee shop and see the barista pulling up to their shift in a brand new Beemer, it might be one of us.”

How cool would this be?

To work a job like at a coffee shop or tuning golf clubs without the stress of needing it to put food on the table? In that case, the job might be… fun! Like, weightless.

But because our survival so often rests on our jobs, they can so easily become miserable. This goes with any job, CEOs, presidents, executives included. We tend to sell ourselves in order to eke out an existence. I’m among this group.

Well, existentially, the authentic Christian faith is kind of like being that trust-fund barista. Whatever happens at our metaphorical j-o-b (life in the world) has zero bearing on our ultimate existence (being eternally and unconditionally loved by the Ground of Being itself).

Christ reveals something that we didn’t know before — that all the love, acceptance, and emotional currency we’ve been striving so hard for has been ours since the dawn of time.

We’re like ontological trust fund babies and Jesus handed us the bank account login info.

So now, we can go sling those espressos, turn the hipster music up, and pass on our lighthearted joy to our all-too-serious customers.

If they only knew what we knew, they, too, might be able to lighten up a little bit.

As Ever,
Jonas