Duke, like many schools, requires all incoming first-year students to read a specially selected book over the summer before orientation. This year the assigned reading for the class of 2014 was Ron Currie Jr.’s Everything Matters!. Currie tells the story of Junior Thibodeau, a boy who comes of age with specific knowledge of the precise date of the end of the world: June 15, 2010. It is, as Currie writes, “thirty-six years, one hundred sixty-eight days, fourteen hours, and twenty-three seconds” from the moment of Junior’s birth. Junior’s knowledge of this impending catastrophe enables Currie to take the reader through a beautifully constructed long-form answer to a staple question of armchair philosophy: how would you live differently if you knew the date of your own death?

Of course, Junior doesn’t simply know that he is going to die, but that planet earth is going to be smashed into oblivion by a comet. This means that he still has time to partner with the government to design a space station capable of preserving human life. It also means he can fight to save the two great passions of his life – adoration of his father and affection for his adolescent love, Amy. Consider the following (slightly abbreviated) exchange he has with a government agent about “the Program.”

“My whole life there never was a point to anything. Oblivion was always just around the corner, so what was the use of, say, trying to make the varsity basketball team, or starting a retirement fund, or having kids, or any of the other things that normal people do? No point. To anything. Try to imagine what that would be like”

“And then we came along,” Sawyer says.

“Eventually, yes. When you came to me, I saw an opportunity to take the world I’d always known, and change it into the world that you, and everyone else, has always enjoyed – a world where what you do and say matters. A world that has a point to it. So I took that opportunity.”

As Junior finds hope in circumventing the end of the world, life takes meaning. Problems emerge, however, when he discovers that pursuit of eternity is not as meaningful as he’d hoped. His best efforts to preserve those crucial relationships unravel so tragically that he chooses spend his last moments standing defiantly atop a mountain in Maine instead of entering the space biosphere he helped create. The voice he has heard since childhood speaks to him in this oblivion and commends his noble efforts:

“So your reward is a simple choice, one that has never been granted to anyone else. … What we’re offering … is simply this: pick a self. Any self. We’re allowing you to choose, and then become, any you that you want. It can be a you that you’ve already been, any you along the timeline of the life already lived.”

I won’t spoil the rest of the story by telling you which moment Junior chooses or how his life unfolds after that crucial choice. What’s important is simply that he lives his second life content with impending oblivion and in full embrace of the fragile relationships he once sought to make permanent. His newfound finitude is blissful and the voice returns again, saying, “Everything ends, and Everything matters. … Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got … and after everything is nothing.” Junior finally learns to live today when he comes to terms with a finite tomorrow.

As a Christian with some distaste for “pie in the sky” theology, I am drawn to Junior’s gradual appreciation for the significance of the present. I’m reminded of Diakonia, a Christian development organization whose slogan reads: We Believe in Life before Death (incidentally, this is also an atheist bumper sticker). At the same time, however, I have a deep interest not just in a meaningful present, but in a theological understanding of how the present receives its meaning. I want to know not just that everything matters, but why everything matters.

At the beginning of a chapter on Christian ethics, Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells write, “God gives his people everything they need to follow him. In the context of contemporary Christian ethics, this claim may seem incomprehensible, bewildering, and absurd. Incomprehensible, because it suggests that ethics is about being disciples and witnesses (following him); bewildering, because it speaks of the abundance of resources rather than their scarcity (everything they need); absurd, because it suggests that the subject of ethics is not those who self-define and self-express, but about the one who gives (God).”

It seems to me that the bedrock of Currie’s narrative is a belief that scarcity determines  value. Everything matters precisely because there’s not enough to go around. Junior’s pursuit of an infinite future for humanity leads him only to emptiness. When he embraces the scarcity of time and life – when he embraces oblivion – everything is infused with new meaning. A key element of this worldview is a commitment to the significance of individual choice. Notice that when Junior gets to recreate the world he is given the option of choosing a self. Not a time or a place – a self. Junior recreates himself, and in so doing he chooses a finite life where everything matters.

As I mentioned above, I’m sympathetic to Currie’s appeal to the significance of the present – Junior’s second life is filled with beautiful moments reinforcing the power of persistent love in the face of hardship. For Christians, however, value comes not from scarcity, but abundance. Everything matters not because we choose to create its meaning, but because God’s creative patience makes possible our very selves. Everything matters because an abundant God has given us the gift of time in which to be faithful.

Ron Currie, Jr., Everything Matters! (Penguin Books, 2009).

Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).