meaning

Sixty One

I’ve started listening to a podcast – The Partially Examined Life – which is basically a bunch of dudes discussing a paper written by a philosopher. The episode I listened to today was on “An Absurd Reasoning” by Albert Camus.

They were talking about life and meaning and how meaning in life was to be meaningful to someone. Does that make sense? Basically, there is meaning in life if you mean something to someone. Then one of the hosts made a comment about how that was the function that deities, or religion fulfilled. That is, religion gives meaning to people because they feel that the deity finds meaning in them.

Is that all religion is? A tool to hold human beings back from nihilism?

Oh man, I don’t know. I don’t know how to deconstruct my faith constructively. I don’t want to just pull it apart and leave it at that. I want to seek truth but I don’t know how to do that honestly and objectively. But maybe it’s not possible to do it objectively? Damn it, I keep coming back to this issue with free will. I know that I’m born into a life where I’ve inherited a lot of the decisions that other people have made for me (we all are), so my thinking and values and beliefs are already skewed from the get-go. All I can do is my best with what I know.

…But what do I know?!

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Fifty

This morning when I woke up, I lay awake for a while and started singing in my head “Your Love is Strong” by Jon Foreman. It was the song I played at my baptism and the first time in a long time that I had thought about it.

So I got up, fired up the old lappy, searched for Jon Foreman on Spotify, chucked on my good headphones and listened to that song. I really love listening to music through good headphones and doing nothing else, just concentrating on the sounds that come through into your ears.

I played that song, and then I played “The House of God Forever” which was also played at my baptism. There’s a part in it that says – Your shepherd’s staff / Comforts me – and in that moment, as the song played those lines, I felt God say to me “I know where we’re going”.

The last several months have seen some of the hardest minutes, hours, days, weeks, that I’ve ever experienced. One of the side effects of grief is being ripped away from a life that you thought was safe, that you could rely on, a life that you thought you were in control of. I’ve never felt so lost as I have this year, never felt this deep lack of purpose and meaning in my life.

Now I feel like it’s going to be okay. Because even if I have no idea where I’m going or what I’m doing with my life, that nothing I do will ever amount to anything, it’s okay. It’s okay because God knows where we’re going.