The Restlessness in Being Human

There are some words that have become fashionable in our age, and cynicism may be one of the most respectable among them.

Spend an evening browsing social media, watching the evening news, or listening to political commentators, and you could easily conclude that cynicism is simply the best evidence of intelligence. The truly enlightened person, it seems, has learned to expect very little from humanity. Every noble cause is eventually corrupted. Every institution disappoints. Every leader has feet of clay. Hope is for the naïve; suspicion is for grown-ups.

Yet I have never met anyone who actually wanted to live there.

People may flirt with cynicism, but very few build a home in it.

For all our sophistication, we continue to hope. We still fall in love. We still bring children into an uncertain world. We still cheer when strangers rescue one another during floods and wildfires. We still believe kindness deserves admiration and betrayal deserves grief. We still cannot quite silence the stubborn conviction that life ought to mean something.

That curious contradiction fascinates me. Why, after centuries of disappointment, does the human heart continue to expect goodness?

It was while asking questions like these that I found myself listening to Tim Mackie.

If you have not encountered him before, Mackie is a biblical scholar, teacher, and co-founder of BibleProject, an organization whose animated videos and podcasts have introduced millions of people to the Bible's extraordinary literary beauty. Yet describing him that way somehow misses the point. Plenty of scholars possess impressive credentials. Plenty of teachers know ancient Hebrew. What makes Mackie unusual is not simply what he knows, but the way he invites people to see.

Listening to him feels rather like taking a walk with someone who notices things the rest of us keep passing by. Every few moments he pauses, smiles with genuine delight, and says, "Have you ever wondered why that's there?" Suddenly a familiar biblical story becomes unfamiliar again ... in the best possible way. Doors that appeared permanently locked begin to swing open.

His enthusiasm is infectious, and, thankfully, it is accompanied by a refreshing absence of certainty's arrogance. There is no sense that he is trying to win an argument. He seems far more interested in awakening curiosity.

That, I suspect, explains why so many people who would never voluntarily attend a theology lecture happily spend hours listening to him talk about Genesis. What surprised me most, however, was not his scholarship. It's where he chooses to begin.

Many presentations of Christianity start with what is wrong with humanity. Mackie starts somewhere else entirely. He starts with what is beautiful.

Open the Bible, he reminds us, and you do not first encounter sin. You encounter delight. A world overflowing with goodness. Rivers, trees, stars, animals, gardens, meaningful work, companionship, creativity. Human beings appear on the scene not as miserable creatures barely tolerated by God, but as image bearers entrusted with reflecting God's wisdom into the world.

That beginning matters more than we often realize.

If the story begins with goodness, then perhaps our deepest longings are not embarrassing weaknesses to overcome but reminders of what we were made for. Perhaps the reason beauty catches us off guard is because beauty belongs at the centre of reality. Perhaps the reason injustice outrages us is because somewhere within us remains the memory that things were never meant to be this way.

It is a profoundly hopeful way of reading both the Bible and ourselves.

Of course, hope raises another question. If humanity was created for such goodness, why do we make such a spectacular mess of things? Here Mackie is wonderfully realistic. He has no interest in pretending that people are naturally wonderful if only society would leave them alone. Nor does he paint humanity as hopelessly corrupt. Instead, he insists the Bible holds together two truths that we are forever trying to pull apart.

Human beings are glorious.

Human beings are broken.

The evidence for both surrounds us every day. We compose symphonies and write poetry. We invent vaccines that save millions of lives. We rush into burning buildings to rescue strangers we have never met. And then, almost without missing a beat, we gossip, exploit, deceive, nurse resentments, and create online comment sections that occasionally make one wonder whether the Tower of Babel has quietly reopened for business.

We laugh because we recognize ourselves.

The Bible, Mackie argues, recognizes us too.

Rather than flattening humanity into either saints or villains, it tells the uncomfortable truth that we are somehow both. We carry extraordinary dignity because we bear God's image, yet we consistently fail to live up to that calling. The tragedy is not merely that we break rules. It is that we damage relationships ... with one another, with creation, and with God himself.

That brokenness, however, is never allowed to become the final chapter.

Again and again, Mackie returns to one of the Bible's great themes: exile. At first glance, exile appears to be an ancient political event, the story of Israel losing its homeland. Yet under his careful guidance it becomes something surprisingly familiar. Exile is not simply about geography. It is about the quiet sense that we are somehow not home. Most of us know that feeling.

We can be surrounded by possessions and still feel empty. We can achieve success and wonder why satisfaction keeps slipping just beyond our reach. We can fill every waking hour with activity and still sense an unexplained longing that refuses to disappear.

Perhaps, Mackie suggests, that longing is not a defect.

Perhaps it is a clue.

Perhaps the restlessness we spend so much energy trying to silence is gently pointing us toward the One for whom we were made. Seen in that light, Jesus enters the biblical story not simply as a moral teacher dispensing better advice. He arrives announcing that God's work of restoration has begun. His message is not merely about individual salvation, important though that is. It is about the renewal of all things. Relationships can be healed. Enemies can become neighbours. Forgiveness can interrupt cycles of revenge. Creation itself is moving toward reconciliation rather than ruin.

That vision is astonishingly expansive. It is also deeply attractive. Not because it promises an easy life, but because it refuses to believe that evil deserves the final word.

Perhaps this explains why Tim Mackie's work resonates so widely in an age weary of slogans and suspicious of certainty. He does not ask us to ignore our questions. He asks us to ask better ones. He does not dismiss our longing for meaning as sentimental wishful thinking. He treats it as one of the most significant facts about being human.

The more I have listened to him, the more I have wondered whether our age has misunderstood its own restlessness. We assume that because we are restless, something must be wrong with us. We search for another achievement, another experience, another distraction, another ideology, hoping the ache will finally disappear. But Mackie quietly suggests another possibility.

What if the ache was never the problem? What if it was an invitation? An invitation to understand more; to find the true meaning; to connect the dots of what is true reality; to finally know ourselves.

The older I become, the less interested I am in arguments that merely prove a point. I find myself drawn instead to ideas that make sense of ordinary life ... why beauty moves us to tears, why forgiveness feels miraculous, why love continues to seem worth the risk, and why hope, despite every reason to abandon it, somehow keeps finding its way back into the human heart. Tim Mackie has convinced me that the Bible was asking those questions long before we were.

And perhaps that is why it continues to speak so powerfully today.