Kon-Tiki: How six shirtless Norwegian guys got me thinking about eternity.

Last night I went to see a movie called Kon-Tiki. Apparently it’s based on a true story of how a team of six Norwegian guys crossed the Pacific Ocean on a raft. It was a very good movie and it got me thinking that I would really love to spend a week on a raft in the middle of an ocean with no horizon in sight; and spend the nights looking up at a multitude of stars. It would certainly adjust my perspective on things. Then after a week I’d get bored and start longing for things run by electricity. 

But that’s not why I wrote this blog post.

At the end of the movie they showed what had happened with each of the men. They’d all gone on to do amazing things, of course, but the main character’s wife ended up leaving him, and her reason was that even though his adventurous spirit is what had made her fall in love with him in the first place, it didn’t mesh with having a family. He’d chosen his ambition over her and their two sons. And it made me think: So many amazing and important feats have been accomplished and discoveries made as a result of men (and women for that matter) having completely ignored their families in favor of the great discovery. One could argue that in the grand scheme of things, it was probably worth the son growing up with an absent father and the marriage being sacrificed since it resulted in such an important advance for mankind. On the macro level, yeah, it’s easy to reason away the rejected responsibility toward family. But I wonder how God looks upon that kind of thing. Sure, we need to make new discoveries in order to continue developing and advancing, and God has created us with the amazing ability to be inventive and curious. However, on a micro level, are those (often vital) discoveries worth the broken relationships left in their afterglow? I’m not sure how to answer that question. Civilization is  indeed grateful to these individuals, but would the rejected son or daughter share our gratitude? Would the abandoned wife or husband? This may not be theologically sound reasoning, but I think that relationships are the only thing we take with us when we die. How we treated the people around us is what we’ll be judged on. That’s a sobering thought.