We Go On
We Go On: Finding Purpose in All of Life’s Sorrows and Joys
By: John Onwuchekwa
[This was on my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2022]
“Ecclesiastes cries with us in our sorrow, in our disappointment. It shares with us in our pain and frustration. It doesn’t give easy answers to difficult questions. It sees things as they really are. But it also doesn’t leave you there.”
“God loves to call the brightest futures out of the darkest circumstances.”
‘We Go On’ was titled by the influence of MLK’s final book called ‘Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?’ John O. helps us move forward—on— with guidance from the book of Ecclesiastes.
This may seem strange at first because we typically just think of the vanity of life when we think of Ecclesiastes. Everything is meaningless! There’s nothing new under the sun! Does it really offer hope?
John says,
“I want to show you that being honest about the seeming meaninglessness of our present joys and sorrows isn’t the same as being hopeless about the future. Honest and hope aren’t parallel streets we travel down. They intersect. Which means we don’t have to choose if we’re going to be honest or hopeful. We can be both. In fact, understanding what really matters today— or what really doesn’t matter— has real consequences for the way you’ll live your life tomorrow, and the next, and the day after that.”
Honest is a good descriptor for John and this book. He shares of his own experiences of the death of his brother, his strained relationship with his other brother, and years of infertility. He never claims to have all the answers. He makes sure to offer the disclaimer that this book is not meant to.
“These are glass pages; they’ll shatter underneath the weight of expectations they were never meant to carry.”
It’s a short read. Plus the book has pictures! I thought they were a special addition and did make it more beautiful than a typical book.
Considering the teachings of Ecclesiastes requires self reflection, and John provides multiple opportunities in each chapter to do so by asking thoughtful questions and encouragement to remember certain things. He also frequently provides prayers. I liked this too because it helps keep the reader focused on our posture before God and our dependence on him.
Okay, Fam (as he calls us readers), there are a couple things that stuck out to me about this book.
First, is John O.’s commitment to clarity.
“It’s about clarity. It’s about seeing things for what they truly are.”
Reality. Which is both bitter and sweet. There are both sorrows and joys. We don’t need to wallow in the downs and we shouldn’t ignore them all together and pretend they don’t exist. We must see the world for what it really is, our lives for what they truly are. Both the good and bad parts.
I appreciate that commitment because I’m tired of false positivity or sugarcoated lies that make us feel better about ourselves or our choices. We need reality.
Second, his illustration about coffee. Which surprised me a bit because I am anti-coffee. I don’t like it and I doubt I ever will. I don’t understand the coffee addicts. . But his illustration was still something that resonated with me.
He considers two ways of looking at life,
“A lot of folks treat life like a cup of coffee. They don’t want to taste the bitterness. They even want to pretend it isn’t there. So, they reach for accomplishments, relationships, and work— anything to make life sweeter, or at least less bitter. And before they know it, life becomes the equivalent of a ‘coffee-flavored’ beverage. It’s not really life, like it’s not really coffee. It’s just “life-flavored.” They want it sweet or not at all.”
“What about those who only see coffee as a means to an end? They don’t care about the flavor; they care about the caffeine. That’s like living in the future tense. It’s always the next thing… It doesn’t distract you. It just gets you where you want to go. But that’s not life either… That’s missing out on the gift.”
Whether or not you are a regular attendee in the Starbucks drive-thru or gulping straight black coffee every morning at 6 am, I think you can see yourself in this illustration. Either option is easier than accepting the cup of coffee we are handed, however sweet or bitter.
John O. has written this book to help us, as the subtitle states, find purpose in both the sorrows and joys of life. Purpose. Meaning. A cup of coffee is a simplistic version of life, so we need to go beyond that imagery because I’m sure we could each talk about life experiences that felt far more bitter than a bad cup of coffee.
And the first step of finding purpose is understanding that we cannot generate that ourselves.
“I cannot make my life meaningful. I don’t have that much control. But I can testify with my whole heart that God made something beautiful in its time…”
“Where there is hope, there is purpose.”
He talks about the things we turn to for meaning and purpose: knowledge, pleasure, money, work, and security.
“You pursue knowledge, and it leads to lament. You turn to pleasure, but it doesn’t satisfy. You try to get ahold of money in hopes of a better life, but it only takes hold of you. The blood, sweat, and tears of your work are just as likely to leave you with nothing but more of the same. Justice is never on time, if it ever arrives. And despite your best efforts, you can’t outrun adversity any more than a dog can outrun its tail.”
“Purpose isn’t in your hands, but God’s. So, you trust in what you cannot see.”
Knowledge, pleasure, money, work, and security aren’t bad things. But they are also not ultimate things. They are glimpses of what is to come. Gifts from God to be enjoyed as gifts not to replace Him.
So when we are deep in sorrow and our soundtrack is the meaninglessness of life, what do we do?
We worship.
“Our frustration with life can lead us to focus increasingly on ourselves. We need to turn our attention, instead, to our Creator. And that’s what worship does. It affirms who He is and where we stand before Him.”
You may be familiar with John Piper’s adage- ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” God gets glory when He is enough for us, in the good and the bad. And we were created for his glory, not our own.
Perhaps when we’ve lost the purpose in our life it’s because we’ve emphasized the ‘our’ part of the phrase and blurred the reality of our standing before God.
Clarity, remember?
“God gave you your eternal appetite. You have been made to experience pleasure in all its fullness. But like so many things you can turn that gift into a curse if you put it to the wrong purpose. Pleasure isn’t supposed to make you grasp ever more tightly to your passing life. It is meant to loosen your grip on life and point you to God, to make you long for the eternal pleasures of heaven, which will one day make their way to earth.”
I would definitely recommend this book, especially as a companion to a deeper study on Ecclesiastes. The way he writes is like a conversation with a friend and I think it will attract readers young and old. The pangs of the writer of Ecclesiastes can be felt at any age and ‘We Go On’ is a valuable resource to help us get our thoughts straight.
John does a really good job at acknowledging the sorrows of life, validating the feeling, but nudging us to the One who walks us through them.
As it says in Ecclesiastes, there is a season for everything, a cycle, and just like the seasons of fall, winter, spring, and summer, we can’t change that they change. Whatever season of life we’re in, it won’t last forever. John prepares us to be watching for that season change, even if it’s not exactly what we were hoping for.
“Find your orbit around God… it’s going to bring you freedom— freedom from self-centeredness, freedom from orienting yourself around things that won’t satisfy, and freedom from the burden of unmet expectations about how your life is supposed to turn out. You don’t need to know where you’re going if you know that God does.”
A Few More Quotes
“Your ‘why God?’ Can easily turn into, How could you, God? How dare you, God?! But these are no longer questions. They’re accusations. Your heart rages, and God becomes the target.”
“Don’t approach God in worship so He can hear you better. Approach Him so you can hear Him better.”
“Through [the life of Christ] we learn that contentment has nothing to do with a number. It has to do with freedom and salvation. It has to do with fullness of life— both now and in the life to come.”
“You might bristle at being told you’re going to be held accountable for how you live, but that’s actually good news. It means God cares about your life. It is meaningful to Him. It matters. Now you can go on living with purpose.”
Further Reading
He quotes J.I. Packer’s book, Knowing God, and I think that is a must-read!
As we consider what awaits us in heaven, I would recommend Randy Alcorn’s book, Heaven, which goes into further detail about all the things we have to look forward and how that influences the way we view our world now.
On the Road with Saint Augustine by James K.A. Smith takes us on a journey guided by the writings of Augustine talking through all the things Augustine sought after that never satisfied. He covers topics like freedom, ambition, sex, mothers, fathers, friendship, enlightenment, identity, justice, and death.
I would also recommend reading The Daily Grace Co’s study on Habakkuk which reminds us to say ‘Even if’ instead of ‘what if.’ And to trust God even when we don’t see the justice we so desire to see.
Some of what John O. says that I talk about in my rabbit trail reminded me of Isaac Adam’s book Talking About Race, which still didn’t answer all my questions but had a lot of good information on how to have conversations about race that I think are really helpful.
If the meaninglessness of life has gotten you to a point where just getting out of bed feels hard, I would recommend the book On Getting Out of Bed by Alan Noble which is short but a valuable book and touches on similar things like worship and orienting our lives around God.
Rabbit Trail
I think there are some things I maybe disagree with John O. about, but it’s not a cut and dry topic. He talks about the racism he experienced and his desire for racial justice.
“I learned about systemic poverty, the racial wealth gap, redlining, and a history of the government bailing out banks, so long as they weren’t Black-owned… America looked at and treated me differently because of the color of my skin… learning led me to lament…”
Obviously there is truth in these statements, I don’t deny that, but I feel like my perspective on these issues lines up more with what I’ve read in Thomas Sowell’s writings (like Discrimination and Disparities).
As a self-proclaimed coffee-lover, John O. noticed the lack of good coffee shops in the neighborhoods around him. He wanted to rectify that and opened one:
“We called our coffee shop Portrait because we wanted to change the picture that comes to mind when people think of specialty coffee. We also wanted to remind people that the color of their coffee is the same color as the skin of its inventors and producers— no matter how often the final product’s been whitewashed.”
I think his endeavor is great— I linked it above if you want to buy their coffee and see more of their mission— but the phrasing of coffee being whitewashed confuses me. Many black-owned coffee businesses that came out in the last few years talk about wanting to ‘reclaim’ the history of coffee. Did white people lie about coffee’s history? I don’t know. Did they? I guess I’m skeptical that we can claim that coffee is still being stolen and whitened (which I don’t even know what that means…).
It’s great to create black-owned businesses around coffee that has a special meaning to their heritage. I am for that. But I’m not sure if phrasing things like ‘whitewashed’ is a unifying way to do that.
Just like…
I also don’t know how I feel about his capitalization of the word ‘black.’ I’ve seen this done in many recent books and have decided to address it at this point. In some cases, only black is capitalized, sometimes all ethnicities including white and brown are capitalized, etc. John O. only capitalized black.
I’ve read several explanations for why this is being done. The Associated Press has actually changed its rules on how it should be written. Some explain that ‘white’ is a more broad term and can describe several different ethnicities. But a general consensus describes capitalizing Black as an action of power.
From an article in the Atlantic- “We strongly believe that leaving white in lowercase represents a righting of a long-standing wrong and a demand for dignity and racial equity,” Price, of the Insight Center, wrote. Until the wrongs against black people have been righted, she continued, “we cannot embrace equal treatment in our language.”
I don’t think I agree with this train of thought if we think that we need elevate black people by capitalizing the ‘b’ and making sure not to capitalize a ‘w’ as if this will bring unity and equality.
Changing language is a big proponent of critical theory. Controlling language is a significant thing. Look at how the definitions of tolerance, violence, man, woman, etc have changed. A capital letter or lowercase letter seems small, but a change because of a political statement seems a dangerous road to traverse.
The article went on to propose that white people don’t deserve the luxury of a non-capitalized ‘w’ because then they don’t have to be accountable to their… actions.. I guess?
This leads me to question… why woman isn’t capitalized over man. And then we see the slippery slope. Can a capital letter really hold the weight of the entire black experience?
I’m not here to solve the letter problem, my point for bringing it up at all is because John O. employed the ‘new’ way of doing it and it gives me pause because in conjunction with a couple of his other statements it makes me wonder if he affirms Critical Race Theory.
As Christians, participating in politics get tricky. Probably nobody does it right, but there are certain things that I think Christians should be wary of, and one of them is conforming to the politically inspired language changes which seems to be a way to spread the overall cultural narrative that is not biblical.
Of course, my rabbit trail is a public pondering of something I haven’t totally figured out or understood yet, and it for sure doesn’t take away from the veracity John O. writes with. We Go On is still a truthful and valuable book that I will continue to recommend. John O. loves the Lord and he preaches the Gospel and that is what is most important.
Anyway, the capitalization of black is just something I wanted to point out as I continue to follow its usage across other books I read because I feel like it tells me a bit about the user’s position within the cultural narrative to some extent even though I can’t fully articulate it yet.
Don’t let me thoughts keep you from this book or from John O. by any means!
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