The Meaning of Life- Seriously.

Here’s the thing. This is it. Are you ready? I’m about to tell you. 

Life, as we might interpret it, like transient reflections of a dimly lit candle flickering on the mirror of eternity, is hard to pin down. We talk about Life like it’s some mysterious person that we met a coffee shop but at the same conceptualize it far more than a personality would be. We talk about Life “doing” this to us and “giving” such and such and performing all sorts of varieties of incredible and not so incredible feats of victory and dilemma in our worlds. How strange that we know “Life” so intimately but yet never cease to be disappointed by tragedy or amazed at galaxies or riveted at sunlight passing through the trees on an afternoon drive. In fact, the more I think about, this Life that we all debate and analyze and talk about and dissect is probably far more active and reactionary than we are, the individuals supposed to be in command (‘supposed’ to be, a term used loosely) of interpreting our own existence, and in my opinion, that would be awful- to have created a concept that dominated our own reality. But that’s what happens when we, the individual, create our own reality, our own rules for how to exist and how to interpret what Life innately is. So this is my fear: that we allow life to “happen” to us and that Life gets to do more “living” than we do because how can we control all of Life’s seemingly random, unforeseen events? How do we attach purpose to purposelessness? How can we pretend to exercise authority over something that we have no real control over? 

But we can’t live there either- in the grays, I mean. So it’s midnight and I’ve arrived at two possible stations: either Life is fabricated by our own psychology (which is limited by our own mortality, thus meaningless without an absolute foundation) or it was given by an Eternal, Absolute, Creator who could and who had, not only all the power and life to give, but also the ability to set the parameters for our understanding of its reality. 

And if this is true, and the patterns and systems of our rational and logical universe remain consistent, is not in vain but is, on the contrary, saturated with purpose. 

A lot of scholars and figures in higher education would like to make you believe that your existence is nothing more than a fleeting narrative produced by a few million synapses and neurons relaying and sending sensory information from the external world, that’s in turn interpreted by higher functioning regions in the homo sapien brain that reason more complexly and effectively than their past evolutionary counterparts, and that, in short, your life is material, and ultimately meaningless, no matter how advanced our chocolate ice cream engineering skills become (Although they’ll never out rightly disagree, unless they are sold out completely to nihilism-which is extremely braver than adopting Christianity or faith in general for that matter).

So there it is logically. You can decide whether a) swim in a sea of chance and concepts and vague definitions of what you are and why you are and what life truly is and revel in suspension, or you can choose option b) to accept that Life in the human experience is different than just existing, and that Life on Earth was created with certain parameters, purposes, foundations and reasons that will inevitably lead us back to its original Creator like train tracks lead its passengers to a final destination, (not like the creepy horror-death films) but a radiant city paved with the purest gold, exploding with resplendent light. And what’s more, what if I told you we could actually call this Creator by name and even more astoundingly, He actually wanted a relationship with us?

He never meant to confuse anyone. Sometimes we just think we invented Life, and when you stop and really think about it, that’s actually kind of absurd and you really don’t believe that, do you?

So I promise, you will arrive safely home if you acknowledge that the train is the Life God gave you and the tracks were the Words He wrote down to guide you back.

And the meaning of life is this: stay on the train, pick up your map, grab some passengers to take with you, love them and ride that train back home.

He’s waiting and His name is Jesus.