What Does it All mean? | The Eternal Question

The Eternal Question

What does it all mean?

If you’re a human being, the question is in your bones.  It influences your every thought; drives your every decision.  Some spend years in universities searching for an answer from the greatest thinkers in history.  For others it’s a fleeting thought while punching a timeclock–why do I bother with this? 

But mankind as a species is alone in this pursuit.  No dolphin frets about all his triflings amounting to nothing.  Not even the most thoughtful chimp has ever peered into the heavens and wondered if his maker might reside somewhere beyond the stars.

So why is this search unique to us?  Perhaps it’s because we’re unique in having one who wants to be sought by us.

Our search can bring us to only two conclusions: either we’re temporary or we’re permanent.  We either die for good, or we live forever.  The story can have no other ending.

Sartre said that life has no meaning once you lose the illusion of being eternal.  He was pretty close to the truth.  Our days here are either tremendously pivotal or devastatingly trivial; depending on whether we have anything waiting for us afterwards.  The importance of our every action is either eternal or ephemeral.

The last page of a book impacts every page before it.  Nothing in a story can be truly understood until the book is finished.  In the same way, our meaning is dependent on the ending, and our ending is determined by the author. How do we know if we’re in a comedy or a tragedy?

Well, someone who knows the ending–someone outside the story–would have to tell us.  In a way, that’s what the incarnation was.  The author inserted himself into our story in the only way possible: he was born as one of us.  In the first chapter of his Gospel, John tells us that “the world was made through him,” and that he “made his dwelling among us.”  In addition to being history’s author, he’s its main character.

So, along with the rest of mankind, we cannot help but peer into the heavens.  They are so unsearchable that many presume them empty; their vastness dwarfs our globe.  Their apparent order is theorized to be coincidence.

Nevertheless, we feel neither insignificant nor alone, because we believe there is one who peers back.  And we have it on good authority that we will someday see his face.

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