Why You Matterনমুনা

Day Two: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful?

Each of us use some standard to judge if our life is meaningful. Whether it’s our feelings or intellect, position or power, or natural ability or strength, there is something every one of us looks to in determining if our life is measuring up or not. I hope that you and I would agree that when we talk about a meaningful life, we are talking about something deeper than happiness. We are talking about a purpose that leads to joy, something powerful enough to sustain us even when all else may fail us.

So, if it’s not happiness, what determines if our lives are meaningful? Or, I suppose I should say, who determines if our lives are meaningful—us or God? These are the two options in the quest for meaning, and they are drastically different. The one thing they have in common is the need for a creator. Meaning doesn’t come from nothing.

Christianity claims that since we are made in the image of God, we are valuable by virtue of what we are, not what we can do or become. Our value is a permanent part of our nature. It does not need to be acquired; it’s intrinsic. 

If God exists, meaning is inherent to life, and human value is fixed and rooted in the kind of thing it is: a human life. If God does not exist, life is inherently meaningless and worthless, though it might become valuable by virtue of what it can do or become. We either steward a meaningful life or create it. These starting points are vastly different from one another.

If you are a Christian, do you really believe that your life is intrinsically valuable? Do you really believe that life has a grand purpose in which you can live out your inherently meaningful life? Or have you been operating out of the assumption that you must make your life worth something?

Reflecting on simple things often leads to profound insights. Either it is true that you live in a reality where the One who made everything knows every bit of you, loves you, and will guide you in living out a life of inherent meaning and intrinsic value, or it is true that you live in a reality where meaning and value are constructs of a random process lacking no greater significance than what you assign to them.

The fact that we all have the drive and desire to have a life of meaning says something about what it means to be human. 

What or who gives your life meaning?