To What Point and Purpose?

Some days you just want to give up.  It just doesn't seem worth it to keep struggling on all by your lonesome.  Do you know what I mean?

I'm sure many people feel this way on account of some legitimate castastrophe such as losing everything in a hurricane or being torn from their homes and threatened with death if they won't give up their faith.  However, I seem able to feel this way from something insignificant, such as some slight disappointment or a feeling that I am going to fail at something or simply because I want more than what I have.

Today was one of those days for me.  It started out well with one of the greatest blessings bestowed upon mankind, but for some reason after spending hours trying to get ready for my senior year as a drama major I found I really didn't care very much anymore.  If I were someone else I would just say forget it and go watch some movie or television show for the fourth or fifth time and have a grand old time.  But I can't do that.  I seem to be overly responsible or something.  So I just plowed onward until I found I felt as if I hated it all.

Then it occurred to me that I didn't have to do it.  I was the only one making myself finish my degree as a drama major.  Why didn't I just choose to do something I enjoyed more?

When I couldn't stand it anymore I went for a long bike ride, seeing how far my stubbornness and rising anger at myself and my heap of work could carry me.  I am pretty stubborn, so I know it could have carried me a good distance, but that wouldn't have been enough to take me up and down all those hills...

As I forced myself up a ridiculously-steep hill and my legs began to ache and my breath came short, I wondered why I was doing this.  It seemed like a sort of analogy for the preparation for my senior year.  I could just as easily have given up on that.  After all, I was the only reason I was physically forcing myself up the hill with the heat forcing sweat from my pores.  Why didn't I give up?

Well, I'll tell you this: it wasn't for myself; it was for you, my friends or random strangers who come upon this blog.  This may sound silly unless you believe in the power of intercessory prayer, but there it is.

If I had someone with whom I could share all this I might never have broken my nearly two years of silence on this blog, but, feeling lonely, I decided to cast my words out, not knowing where they might touch.  It's not that I don't have friends—I have been extraordinarily blessed in that regard actually—but they all seem busy with their lives or something, or maybe I just don't want to risk myself in reaching out.  In any case, sometimes I am so much a writer that I just need to write something, even on the computer.

Anyway, this whole experience reminded me of how worthless life is if we live it for ourselves.  Our society tries to tell us that we should be looking out for our best interests, but if that's what we do somehow or other it seems to make us miserable.  It is those who live life for others who are truly happy.

It is a strange paradox—just like the cross.  That is what the cross was about after all: it was about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, offering up His excruciating suffering for us out of love, transforming something ugly into something beautiful because it was not for Himself; it was for us.  And we can do the same in some less dramatic fashion.

I hope you can see this as beautiful, whether or not you believe in Christ.  If you can't, I shall pray for the conversion of your heart....