What’s The Use
There is a scene in the recent movie Up In The Air. George Clooney is asked to convince his niece’s fiancé not to leave her at the marriage alter. He asked why he was getting cold feet. The young man’s response sounded so familiar to me. He said something like this, “What’s the use. I marry, have kids, work, retire and die. Why even begin?” I thought he was quoting me in my youth.
I fully understand those who commit suicide. Rather than despair though, during my teen years I was fortunate enough to look ahead in life and contemplate its meaning. My thoughts always went down the same path. I’m going to school and train for my chosen vocation. I will start my business and pursue my dream of significance through accumulating money, gaining notoriety and having influence. Then I will get married and have children. I will have a great life of success in my vocation. I will acquire position, prestige, power and prosperity. Some day I will retire to a life of leisure and then I will die. At the end I would always die. This was an unsatisfactory conclusion to life. Some people think life through and decide it is not worth the trouble. I didn’t.
Significant Questions
I thought, what if there is an afterlife and what if I ended up on the wrong side of it? That thinking caused me some considerable concern. While hunting alone in the fields in my youth I would contemplate these things. What is the meaning of life? Am I a cosmic accident? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Is there a heaven or a hell or both? What am I doing here anyway? Where did I come from? How did the universe come into existence? Is Jesus for real the way I have been told by others? I don’t know if everyone thinks about life as I did but I suspect most people do.
I am a concrete thinker. Things need to make sense to me logically and with reason. I do not care much for abstract things. In fact I failed senior literature in high school. My teacher would ask me what a poet meant by what he wrote. My standard answer was, “I think he meant what he said or he would have said what he meant.” It’s no surprise that I flunked he course.
Significant Answers
Fortunately, I did not fail to discover some of the answers to my questions about the meaning of life. It is logical to me. It is not very abstract. As I sat out in nature hunting, I would contemplate space. It is not abstract at all. There it is in all of its infinite beauty. I knew it went on without end. Space is infinite. I understand the infinity of one divided by three, but the infinity of space is incomprehensible while just as factual as an infinite number. It frustrated me as I tried to explain the infinity of space. There must be an end, but what is on the other side of space? How can it just go on and on? These questions seemed very similar to my questions about the existence of a god or life after death.
One day I experienced one of those “light bulb over the head” moments. I thought if there is one thing I know to be infinite — space — then there could be more than one. Suddenly it dawned upon me that the infinity of God is no more mysterious than the infinity of space. He just goes on and on. He never ends. He has no beginning. I became a theist. I came to believe there really is a God. With that realization, many other things began to make more sense to me. Life began to take on meaning as I embraced an afterlife and acquired an eternal perspective. Yes, there really is a God and this is how I came to believe it.