The Lifeboat Theory
by Taylor Martin, Reporter
We live in a world where we are always trying to one-up the person next to us. Think about it. If you are in a class receiving your test from the week before back from your professor and you look down and see that you received a "C", depending on who you are you might be initially pleased or disappointed. Now say you look around to all of your friends in the class, and everyone else received an "F" on the test. How do you feel now? Suppose the opposite, you look around, and every single person in the class, except you, received an "A", do you still feel okay with your "C", or does the success of your classmates somehow tarnish the reasonable grade that you were given?
Take this one step further. Say, in a hypothetical situation, you are on a lifeboat floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with five other people. Everyone immediately realizes that you have too much weight in the raft, and that within two hours the boat will be taking on too much water. You realize that in order to save the rest of the group, you are going to have to throw one person overboard (and yes, there are sharks swimming all around, so you can't just have one person get out and swim).
Immediately every single person in that lifeboat is giving reasons for why they should survive, why they are important. The doctor is saying that he has an important job in which he saves lives, so he shouldn't be thrown out. The mother is saying that she has three children at home, so she shouldn't be thrown out. Bill Gates (yes, Bill Gates) is offering everybody else one million dollars to not be thrown out. And so on and so on. Donald Miller calls this idea his "Lifeboat Theory."
In a sense, doesn't this feel like how our world is ordered? We are always jockeying for position, trying to one up the person next to us. But for what? A better spot in heaven? Why do we get so angry and upset when someone cuts us off on our way to work (or school)? Is it really because we are going to be one second later to wherever we need to go? No, it's because we feel wronged, we feel disrespected. We feel that in some way, someone just took what wasn't rightfully theirs, and that somehow reduces what is ours.
This is one of the many beauties of the message that Jesus preached. "Let all who are thirsty come." There is going to be plenty of water from the well for you to drink, regardless if the person next to you is extremely thirsty and taking "more than their fair share." Christianity, no, Jesus, is bigger than the lifeboat. We were made to have someone outside of ourselves tell us our worth. In Eden, Adam and Eve had God walking with them, telling them how much he loved them, so much so, that they didn't even notice they were naked. But after that fated day when the serpent tricked Adam and Eve, we were no longer in perfect communion with our creator. Suddenly the world is turned on its head and we have a gap in our souls where God's love is supposed to be; we realize we are naked. So we go around trying to win approval, we put ourselves inside that lifeboat, with the mindset that there is only so much approval to go around, and if someone earns approval, it is as if we are denied it, as if we are on the out.
And there is Jesus, standing amidst us all, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty" (John 6:35).