To  every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
          A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
          A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
          A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
          A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
          A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
          A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
          A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
                                                                      Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
                                                                                 Holy Bible
By the time I was 17 in 1965 when the British group The Byrds came out with a song with these very same words as lyrics, I had completely dismissed God from my life.  But the inner searching for the meaning of life had only intensified.  Like many people of that generation, I searched for meaning in astrology, in Eastern religions, in reincarnation, and found them all vain and useless, most of it idiotic in its concepts.  Reincarnation seemed especially irrational to  me.  It was bad enough being here once, but to endlessly keep recycling through lifetimes never making any progress was absurd.  The state of the world and mankind proved that to anyone truly seeking the Truth.
          That Byrds' song, still one of my favorite oldies, ends with the plaintive words, "a time for peace, I swear it's not too late."
          Well, there wasn't peace then in the world and  there wasn't any inner peace in me either.
          Was The Truth out there somewhere . . . ?
          My futile little mind created its own answers, and I concluded that there was no purpose to life.  Above all, God was just doing His thing, and all of His creatures, those created in His image, were just dancing puppet-fashion on their fragile life strings, being born and dying against their will, never understanding why they had even existed.   But, my heart and mind could not be stilled from making some sense of the emptiness of individual lives and the chaotic, ugliness of life, and the deplorable state of the world. 
          From time to time through the years I returned to my spiritual roots, and sought the truth in the words of the God I had rejected so long before.
          Through  years of perpetual searching, seeking, and pondering the perplexities of life, His truth had been gently presenting itself as unnoticed as the gentlest breeze.  God had heard all the questions through all the wasted years, had seen the hopelessness of my heart, and the desolation of my life, and had never left me alone.  In His time, answers began
arriving, softly, sweetly, gently as is always His way.
          Along the way His most profound truth permeated my consciousness:  life and death were not the issue.  He had given me free will, but that free will was to be used for one purpose and one purpose only, to choose Him, to choose to acknowledge His perfect plan of redemption from the futility of life, to choose to live for Him according to His purpose for my life and not my own.
          Yes, he had created Adam and every person since from the dust of the ground and ordained every person to return to dust.  It is the spiritual path in between these two events that concerns God.  Somewhere in between these two points lies the meaning of life.
          (From here on in the text there will be numeric notations which are footnotes to scriptures at the end of this story).
          Since my earliest days in Sunday School, I remembered the messages of two scriptures more than any others.  One of them had haunted me all my life, and I do mean haunted!  It never allowed me any spiritual peace.  "What did you do with what I gave you?"  (1)   I have gone through frightening times in my life praying that I would never hear that question because I had no answer.   I had squandered my life vainly searching for the purpose of life.  I had seen the futility of life from every side by now and could not be fooled or deceived any longer.  
          One truth became clear:  There isn't anything that I or any other human could ever do that would measure up to God's expectations.  In the beginning, I thought He had a nerve even threatening us with the question!
          If I miraculously came up with a cure for cancer or broken hearts, something even more vile and deadly would replace them.  There isn't anything I could accomplish in my life that would ever amount to a hill of beans to the world or to God.
          In the whole scheme of eternity, the few years I spend here are inconsequential, meaningless, as though I never existed at all.  Like a relentlessly moving shadow, however, the questions about the purpose of life crawled along behind me, closer and closer, reminding me deep in my soul that the question would be asked, and I would have to answer it eventually, maybe sooner than I expected:

" What did you do with what I gave you?"

          The same "time" that had terrified me from age nine was creeping, now seemingly leaping onward, and by now I had wasted over 40 years pondering life and death, infinity, eternity, and time.
          A haunting return to Ecclesiastes 3!!!