How Severed Are We?
Do you wonder what it would be like to live two lives and not remember what the other life is like? Look no further! Severance is the show for you. Severance is one of the most original shows to come out of the last ten years. The whole premise of the show is that a company promises the ultimate work-life balance. You can have two different selves: one who remembers your life inside of work and one who remembers your outside life. You can have the perfect work-life balance. One life will not interfere with the other. How they accomplish this is through a process called severance. Severance is a surgical operation in which your mind is split into two memories; one memory is for your work self and the other is for your domestic self. The show follows characters who are trying to figure out what the evil company Luman is doing. The show really puts into perspective the idea of work-life balance. In one sense we don't want to bring work stuff home and home stuff to work. On the surface, that sounds good, yet what if we took it too far? What if we started to separate the world completely? What if we over compartmentalized our lives?
Severance is a warning about how we have tried to sever ourselves not just in the workplace but our entire lives. We live in a compartmentalized world where we put on a different face based upon our role in a context, and the separate worlds do not interact at all. We are becoming accustomed to this severed life. We try to put on a new face in every situation. In reality we are hiding who we are. Sometimes we do not even recognize ourselves. What do we do about the severing of ourselves, where we don't allow each part of ourselves to be made whole? Where do we find wholeness?
The path to wholeness for the follower of Jesus is Christ himself. In the book of Romans, Paul says that we have a sinful nature, one that is bent to sin, yet we also have a nature that is inclined to be good. We are severed. At the end of Romans 7, Paul says that he is, in his mind, a slave to the law of God and, in his sinful nature, a slave to the law of sin. Is that the end? Are we just to remain severed humans, struggling with sin? Paul does not end there. In Romans 8, Paul says that in Christ we are no longer condemned; we are free from the law of sin and death and are invited to live in the law of the Holy Spirit. We don't have to live severed anymore. In Christ, we don't have to be divided; our whole life can be under the umbrella of the grace of God, and this is sanctification. Life in the Spirit is not divided but made whole. All of ourselves and every aspect of our life can be made sacred, even our work self. There is no place where the work of Christ cannot touch. The whole person is impacted by the gospel, not just part of us but all of ourselves. In Christ we are severed no longer.
