I Am Still Choosing Love

How do we live a meaningful life when we cannot make sense of what happens to us?

Layered beneath this question are just some of the others that lead to it:

·       Is there a God?

·       If there is a God, then why suffering, especially innocent suffering?

·       Why does one person, like our first child, get 18 days and another 90 years?

·       Is there any purpose behind any of this, or do we create purpose ourselves?

·       Why love when loving someone guarantees that eventually one of you will lose the

other?

·       Can God still be good when the thing you desperately prayed wouldn’t happen

happens?

·       Why does any of this exist at all?

And these are just the beginning of the questions that I have pouring through my mind.

I cannot sleep most nights. I get up and read the classics and philosophical works that challenge me and try to answer or make sense of life’s greatest mysteries. I write to try and understand it all, mostly to no avail.

But here is another question:

If you knew with absolute certainty that you would never receive an answer to the question “Why?”, would that change the way you choose to live tomorrow?

For me it wouldn’t.

I would still choose to live with empathy, compassion, grace, hope, and love.

And this might be more significant than finding any answers. I would choose those five things without an explanation.

A child’s suffering remains terrible. Loss doesn’t suddenly become reasonable. They exist, whether I can make sense of them or not.

Maybe the question is not, “Can I explain suffering?” but “What will suffering make of me?”

I do not understand. I probably never will. But not understanding will not take empathy, compassion, grace, hope, and love away from me.

I think most people have wrestled with these questions throughout human history – at least on the surface. Some, like me, go deeper. Others, like the great thinkers, writers, scientists, theologians, and philosophers, search on an entirely different level.

I do my best to live in the present, but it is not easy. At times, fear of the unknown and uncertainty about life take on too much influence, and I am guilty of letting them.

Yet when I consider the atrocities unfolding around the world and the hardships people endure, I recognize that, among more than eight billion people on this planet, I am extraordinarily lucky, fortunate, or blessed.

What if the meaning of a life isn't ultimately found in understanding why everything happened but in deciding who we became because it happened?

Maybe it is that simple.

There are no neat answers to the questions I have.

I guess I still am choosing love.

But I will continue searching.

It is what I do.