The Great Adventure of Life

Paul Tournier (12 May 1898 – 7 October 1986) was a Swiss physician and author who had acquired a worldwide audience for his work in pastoral counseling . His ideas had a significant impact on the spiritual and psychosocial aspects of routine patient care, and he has been called the twentieth century's most famous Christian physician. I discovered Paul Tournier's book The Person Reborn about 20 years ago, and I was stunned by his insights into the human spirit. Fortunately, I copied a chapter of the book at the time I was reading it, and later made a number of copies to share with a class I was teaching on the bible. While cleaning out files last week, I found the copied chapter and began re-reading this master of the spiritual life. Reading the chapter more than once made me go find Tournier's book on my shelf (still there even after a hurricane and a move from Louisiana to Mississippi). In accord with my decision to pass along some of the best ideas I have encountered, I am happy to share the following excerpt: We are like a child who has been given a beautiful mechanical toy as a Christmas present. His father says to him: "Come along, and I'll show you how to make it go. The child replies: "No, I want to do it myself!" He tries, gets angry and sulky, takes it to pieces, damages it, and finally admits his incompetence. Defeated, he hands it to his father saying: "There, you make it work." We too have received a beautiful and very complicated toy: life. We try to make it work on our own. We think we are having some success; but then things begin to go wrong, and we run into personal or social disasters. the more we struggle to put things right with our own strength, the worse does the situation become, until at last we come back to God, and offering our lives to him, say: "Take over; I can't manage it on my own." I am always struck by the extreme simplicity of this decisive inner movement. From then on a man has a new attitude. He has realized that only the Author of life can coordinate all the complicated mechanisms that go to make up life. He does not have to disown the intellect, science, or technology; he simply decides that now he will ask God how to use them He surrenders himself; he hands over his life, his person, all his faculties, and all his possessions to God, not knowing what He will do with them. He renounces grand personal plans. He lives each moment as it comes, step by step, eagerly seeking to know what God expects of him. I have stressed the difficulty of know what God's guidance is. I must now assert that despite all the hidden reefs and all our mistakes, God's guidance is more precious and more fruitful than anything else. Seeking after it in every circumstance of our lives is a wonderful adventure -- the great adventure of life with God. It takes all those who commit themselves to it much farther than they expect. It is the source of an ever-buoyant enthusiasm. When I have talked to people about "accepting their lives," they have often objected that it is difficult. I am as convinced of this as they are. I think now that it is preferable to speak of "loving one's life," which is a less passive term. The positive adventure resulting from the abandonment of one's life to Christ makes it possible, gladly to accept everything in that life that remains painful, and in spite of it to love one's life, because even suffering becomes a source of adventure. Pascal laid stress on the boredom, the inner void, which man is constantly trying to forget. "It is unbelievable," a woman writes in a letter to me, "how life repeats itself. We change our surroundings and our jobs, but our outlook remains the same." There are many who think that, until they find that when they give their lives to God, their outlook changes fundamentally overnight, and the result is that everything changes around them. I am so grateful to authors like Paul Tournier who have the gift of putting into words what I have experienced in my life. It is frustrating to know things that I cannot express clearly, but it is such a joy to discover and then to re-discover people who can speak the Truth of experience into my very soul.