Oct 1, 2004 All of Lin's marvelous inspirational writing is now available in paperback books! She is a published author! Be sure to visit the web site You can become a published author too! |
Why do I exist? Why am I here at all in this world that daily becomes more full of hate, greed, unkindness, and every vile, and destructive energy? What's the point? What's the purpose? |
Pondering life, death, and eternity |
I began pondering these questions over 40 years ago when I was a mere child of 9 years. My big brother Terry was 19 years old. He had been ill, deathly ill, most of his young life. In my simple, childlike, perfect faith I knew that God was going to heal Terry and make him well. Terry epitomized the meaning of God' s words "love one another." As sick as he was, his thoughts and actions were always focused on bringing joy and love into the lives of others, even when his own life day by day was one of undending suffering in his 13-year illness. He had the heart of God, a wisdom both beyond his years and beyond earthly understanding. On a snowy, frozen day in January of 1957, he had another trip to the hospital, but this one was different - this time he didn't come home. Just like that! In a poof of irretreivable time he was gone. It was incomprehensible and unbelievable to my trusting, childlike heart and mind. |
In that instant of time my life became obsessed with time and the reality of how brief and uncertain time and life are. The reality that slammed through me that day persists still: time and life are fragile, uncertain, and very, very brief. Even more devastating than that knowledge was the shattering of my belief in a loving, caring God. Terry had loved God and lived for God. And that was his reward: No cure, no easing of pain, just death, and being buried in the ground. Gone forever, floating in the nothingness of a black void. That was what my 9-year-old mind understood. How was I supposed to understand when around me everyone else was as devastated and lost in grief as I was. Nobody had any answers; nobody understood. Too young to search out the truth or understand, I became bitter and angry with God, deciding that life was absurd, just a cruel joke. Either God didn't exist at all, I decided, or He was a mean monster to snuff out a life so young, especially the life of one that had loved Him. Was this God's plan, to give us a life of nothing but pain and suffering with our reward only death and being returned to the decaying dirt and dust of the earth? God's own shining light unceremoniously and incomprehensibly snuffed out without any reason or explanation? Like many people old and young who have traveled the path of death through life, I decided no loving God would do this. |
My life has been strewn with death from that day long ago when I was a child until now. The instant and final removal of some of the most loving, beautiful people I will ever know. Best friends from high school dead before they reached the age of 20, wonderful friends who I had the pleasure of knowing and loving through the years, dead in their 40s. My only child dead before he ever had a chance to live. Friends suffering through the deaths of their own children, spouses, and parents. What did it all mean? More than once God miraculously saved my life while the good continued to die young. What was the point and the purpose? |
The heart that seeks eternal truth never rests. It seeks continuously in every experience, every relationship to understand. Eventually, it learns to discern what is not truth, even when it does not know what the truth is. God never leaves or forsakes any of us. Once His hand is upon us, it is there forever, more often than not, unnoticed by the one that it protects and leads. Surely His hand has always been upon me. I turned my back on Him, but He never turned away from me. |
It seemed God couldn't do anything right! The young wanted to live and the old wanted to die, and nobody was getting what they asked for. |
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Through long years of living in the world, seeing the good perish and the wicked, godless, loveless souls prospering, hardened my heart even more. All of the heart cries for understanding from my young soul had floated unanswered in the black void of nothingness, and I grew weary of the endless questioning and seeking. If life was so brief and uncertain, then I'd better just live and quit wasting time on unanswerable questions. I saw the futility of life. I saw lives achieve their most cherished dreams and reach their lofty goals, and I saw the emptiness within them. The questions persisted despite my efforts to dismiss them; troubling me, running relentlessly through the background of my mind. Then one day when I was in my 20s it dawned on me: All those people who had died young, checked out, and moved on were luckier than the rest of us who were still here. God had done them a favor!!! Death wasn't the cruel joke, life was! Those people had fulfilled their purpose in record time and moved on to eternal things. Through the years, I spent time caring for elderly people who knew in their hearts they didn't want to be here any more, but they had no control over leaving. Some of them cried out day and night for God to take them home, but He did not answer. Sometimes their useless lives dragged on through years of physical and mental deterioration. That was as pitiful and unbearable as the dying of the young! What was the point in that? In many cases these people loved Jesus and their lives were exemplary in portraying His love and truth. Even in their frailest moments, His light within them glowed. So, why did they have to linger and continue to suffer? What was the purpose of long life spent in this condition? What kind of God would allow these old ones endless days and years lost to reality, ravaged by age, and senseless in their senility? |
A time to every purpose under heaven . . . |
Oct 1, 2004 All of Lin's marvelous inspirational writing is now available in paperback books! She is a published author! Be sure to visit the web site You can become a published author too! |
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