A New Year and the Meaning of Life

I'm no old man on a mountaintop. I'm no great philosopher or scientist. I'm just a nurse and a mom. Yet despite my relatively poor qualifications, I'm going to muse a little bit on the point of all this. The meaning of life.

The country glowed with the splendor of fireworks as we celebrated the passing and coming of another year. The earth made it around the sun yet again and so we are rewarded with a day off work, some parties, and some fireworks. How many times has our little planet made that journey? And how many more will it still? All these cycles... from day to night and week to month and month to year and back again. Birth then death. Light then dark. Summer then winter. And as our rationally gifted species has cycled through the millennia, again the question surfaces and resurfaces.

Why are we here? What, if anything, is the point of our existence?

There are a lot of speculations out there of course. Filling books, blogs, sermons, lectures and conversations of far grander scope than my little blog. Yet as complicated a question as it can be, it seems to me to boil down to two very basic possibilities.

We are either here on accident, or we are here on purpose.

If the Naturalists are right, and we are here on accident, the question of the meaning of this ember of a life is a mute point. There is no meaning. It just is. At the very bottom of our existence lies only chance and chaos. Not purpose. Go no further, pull whatever you can from life, even though the vast majority of humanity will endure mostly suffering, those that can should eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

If we are here on purpose, however, than the most important question we can ever ask is Who exactly purposed us? And what was that purpose?

It seems to me that if we are here on accident the things that matter most to us are meaningless. What place do justice and mercy have in the survival of the fittest? Compassion is a silly. Beauty is an illusion. Love is chemicals. And the thing that we all need, the thing that we feel lost and hopeless without - meaning... purpose... do not in fact exist in any real way.

But if we are here on purpose, than even suffering has meaning. And everything that matters most to us, like beauty, love, justice, compassion, and purpose, are signposts pointing us to the One that set all the worlds to their turning... and perhaps the cycles of our lives and years are symbols, teaching us about a greater Reality...