a new question

I was talking with an old friend recently, sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake, about meaning and meaninglessness in life and how we do things for ourselves—things that seem great in the moment but never fully give lasting satisfaction.

They say that a sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same results, while each time expecting something different to happen. By this definition, most people (myself included) are insane.

I’ve been searching for meaning in the tangible, everyday things—in what I want and do and say and how I interact and in what I seek and hope and long for. I’ve been trying to find meaning for me in an endless repetition with reckless abandon, hoping each time to find something, never finding lasting meaning.

They also say that life is a gift. Sometimes it seems more like a piece of coal.

I’ve been asking myself the same old and tiresome question for a long time—What is the meaning to my life? Different answers have come and gone and different idioms have stuck and then lost their weight.

Love, the pulse of all, has always been somewhere in answers I’ve found, but what does that mean, to Love? Another question that encapsulates so many more, that gets asked so many times that its known as the cliché, that if you ask it you endanger yourself of becoming sensitive, yet nonetheless the question on everyone’s heart but the answer to which is beyond reach —What is Love?

Because, as someone once said, if I gain truth and knowledge as no one else has, if I can face anything, if I gain all the riches and power this world can offer, if I do every good and charitable deed, but don’t have love, then I am absolutely nothing.

For me, this question has become everything in my attempting plight to true life. Apart from the right answer, a true, convicting answer has been unknowable.

But someone else once said that the answer to the question was made plainly obvious—that Love made its own definition known when it gave itself for us, that true life begins when we accept that.

I stand humbled, rapt in the awe of my own insignificance and in the moving power of God, that he is Love and life, that he loves me, that he gave and gives himself for me. I am nothing yet lack nothing and it is thoroughly well with my soul.

And so the answer to meaning has become piercingly clear— life is a gift to give, to Love.

I’ve realized that I’ve been asking the wrong questions all along. Meaning is in asking a different repetitive question with the same reckless abandon and with all the fervor and perseverance life affords—How can I give my life?