What Is Your Life: James 4:14 on Foundation and Mist

What Is Your Life: James 4:14 on Foundation and Mist

You are sitting in the waiting room. The chart in your hand has a date on it, and the date is not the question. The question is what the date will mean.

Maybe it is a scan. Maybe it is an interview. Maybe it is the second cup of coffee at the kitchen table at 5 a.m. while you wait to find out whether the place you have been investing yourself in for nine years is going to still be there in November. Maybe it is the silence on the other side of a phone call.

The discomfort you feel in that room is not really about the date. It is about life. And if you are honest, you have noticed that the uncertainties about life bite harder than any other kind.

Uncertainty about ideas does not keep you up at night. You can read an article that overturns a thing you used to believe, and by the next afternoon you have either moved or filed the disagreement under “interesting.” The instrument inside you that weighs ideas can take a hit and right itself.

Uncertainty about life does something different.

There is a passage in James I frequently visit. James was writing to people who, by every external measure, were doing what careful people do. They had plans. They had calendars. They had towns marked on maps and profit projections in their heads. James writes to them, and the line is short:

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” (James 4:13–15, ESV)

What is your life. The question is not rhetorical. James is asking the speaker to look down at the substance under his own confidence and name what kind of thing it is.

The merchant has not been thinking about that. He has been thinking about the town and the year and the profit. The vocabulary of his planning assumes a kind of solidity. We will go. We will trade. We will make. The speaker doing the going is breath on cold glass. Visible for a second, and then not.

The reason this bites the way it does is not James’s tone. It is something Solomon wrote a thousand years earlier:

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, ESV)

Eternity in the heart. Time in the body. That is the mismatch you are feeling.

The instrument inside you that reads significance was built for something that does not vanish. The body that houses the instrument was built for about eighty years if the joints hold and the cells behave. When you sit in the waiting room and the discomfort about life rises, the discomfort is not weakness. The instrument is reading correctly. You are an eternity-shaped reader holding a mist-shaped life and trying to decide what to do about the gap.

We build empires of dirt upon that uncertainty.

I have an admission to make if I am going to read James honestly. I have been the merchant. The conference I would speak at, the platform I would build, the book I would finish before fifty, the morning I would still feel my knees doing what they did at thirty. The plan looked careful from inside the planning.

Underneath the plan, doing the planning, was an intellect I trusted before I trusted the floor I was standing on. Marginally decent, the intellect. Good enough for the conference. Sharp enough for the projection. And dirt, when the wind came for what I had built on it.

Jesus told a story about two men who built. Both of them built. That part is important. The story is not about the religious man and the secular man, or the believer and the unbeliever, or the careful man and the careless man. Both men built. Both used materials. Both probably worked hard.

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24–27, ESV)

The wind came to both houses. That is not the variable. The variable is what was underneath.

The wind read what was already true about the second house. The collapse was inside the foundation long before the storm arrived. It had been happening every day, invisibly, while the man congratulated himself on his progress.

The discomfort of life-uncertainty is the wind starting to blow on a structure built on dirt. The structure is beginning to register what it is sitting on.

You cannot soothe this. People are going to try. There is an industry around this ache. The app on your phone asking you to breathe for ten minutes. The book on the bedside table about being present. The podcast playing in your ears on the drive to the appointment. There is thin wisdom in some of it. None of it touches the structural problem. You can be at peace with not-knowing and still be standing on a mist.

Paul wrote one sentence to the Corinthians that has been doing work in the background of all of this:

“For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 3:11, ESV)

The verb is laid. Past tense. The foundation question is about acceptance. Something solid has been put under you. You can keep packing dirt on top of it, or you can let the dirt fall away and stand on the thing that was always there.

Moses asked God to teach him a particular kind of arithmetic. The line is in the ninetieth psalm:

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12, ESV)

The numbering is wisdom because the one who counts his days has finally come to grips with what he is made of.

And then you are back in the waiting room.

The chart still has the date. The interview is still on the calendar. The phone call has not come, or it has come and the answer was not the one you wanted. The uncertainty did not move. This piece does not promise you that the scan will be clean or that the job will arrive or that the person you love will still be here in three years. James did not promise the merchant his profit.

What moves is what is underneath you.

The empire was always dirt. You knew, somewhere, that you were building on something that would not hold. The discomfort was telling you the truth.

The foundation is laid.

It is the only one in the building.

Passages referenced (all ESV):

James 4:13–15  —  Ecclesiastes 3:11  —  Matthew 7:24–27  —  1 Corinthians 3:11  —  Psalm 90:12 — James 4:14