Recovering Meaning in Your Life
When humans lose anything, great or small, they usually employ their best efforts to find and recover what is lost. Even Jesus devoted three of His best-known parables addressing that issue, indicating the great joy experienced by some individuals once what they had lost was found again!
From experience we know that, sadly, some items remain lost and are never recovered. They may have been lost in varied circumstances, making it impossible ever to be found again: stolen by a thief, falling into the depths of the sea, or taken by strong winds and cast into the swift currents of a river. Some may also have been destroyed by fire or any other way impossible to regain.
When God created the first humans, He placed them in the world He had fashioned, with meaning attached to every aspect of His creation. Yet, human disobedience and rebellion in the Garden of Eden, brought sin into the world blinding humanity from seeing and experiencing the meaning which God had intended for the wellbeing of all His human creatures. Since paradise was lost the human race has been engaged into a continual search for it, along with its search for meaning.
As long as humans turned their backs on the true and living God, asserting their individual autonomy, they did not succeed in recapturing genuine meaning in life. The altars they built to illegitimate deities never brought them the satisfaction their souls longed for. Indeed, since the fall of humankind the search for meaning persists, though often conducted in the wrong places, with illegitimate motivations, leading to unsatisfactory alternatives.
Through the ages, by faith in Jesus Christ, countless individuals have recovered meaning in their experience. And as along as He remains the focal point in the thinking and actions of His followers, they will increasingly recognize Him as the meaning of history, the glue of the universe upholding all things by the word of His power (Colossians 1:15-17).
Therefore, there is hope for individuals, and for the world as well. While many who despair for lack of meaning in their existence insist on seeking it in inappropriate places, even if in Reason alone, anyone may truly find it in the God of the universe “in whom we live and move, and have our being” cf. Acts 17:28).
As true meaning is attained, it may be found again in case of momentary loss. One may diligently pursue it in the situations and settings where it may be truly recovered. Meaning may be dead to some; for the child of God, however, it remains a reality to be rediscovered and allowed to resume a positive role in animating a person which also can instill meaning into other fellow humans. As contemporarey French philosopher Chantal Delsol affirms, “Whoever holds the key to a life-giving hope normally seeks to share his convictions.” May Christians never lose sight of this imperative!
Meaning in life, although affecting the entirety of one’s being, is not something that originates within one’s self; it always proceeds from another source, to permeate an individual’s being. Such positive invasion emanates from God through Christ, taking hold of a life, making it a new creation, filling it with meaning, and offering direction for triumph in every step of the human journey!
