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It was one of those too rare occasions when a father and son engage at a deeper than usual level. They were resting after a vigorous session kicking a football around in the park and were lying on their backs on the grass watching the clouds loiter overhead. The son asked “Dad, why are we here?”
Clearly this was a priceless moment, an opportunity not to be missed. So Dad took a deep breath and began: “I've thought a lot about it, son, and I don't think it's all that complicated. I think maybe we're here just to let a younger kid join our game and help him discover how to kick a football properly. We're here to get excited together as we watch our favourite team on the TV. We're here to look all over the golf course, give up, and then find the ball in the hole. We're here to tie the perfect fly, make the perfect cast, catch absolutely nothing, and still call it a perfect day. We're here to make the perfect paper aeroplane that rides the air currents and flies on and on...
I don't think the meaning of life is gnashing our molars over exactly what comes after death but it’s in tasting all the tiny moments that come before it. We're here to be a good friend, to add to life not subtract from it.
I don't think we're here to make it to “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here”. None of us will find ourselves on our deathbeds saying, ‘I wish I'd made more money or become more famous.’ See, grown-ups spend so much time doggedly slaving toward the better car, the perfect house, the big day that will finally make them happy, when happy just walked by wearing a bicycle helmet two sizes too big for him. We're not here to struggle to find a way to heaven. The way is heaven. Does that answer your question, son?”
The son said, “Not really, Dad. What I meant is, why are we here when you told Mum that you would pick her up 40 minutes ago?”
The recent publicity about Ida, the so called missing link fossil, has once again added fuel to the fire in the debate about our origins and therefore the meaning of life – if indeed there is any meaning. Richard Dawkins maintains that we are simply ‘survival machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes’. The Dalai Lama is reputed to have said that ‘the purpose of life is to be happy’. Jesus said: “I have come that they (that is all of us) may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10 NIV) Another way of saying ‘to the full’ would be ‘to live life as the creator intended it to be lived’.
Lou Reid’s famous song, A Perfect Day, begins: ‘Just a perfect day, drink Sangria in the park, and then later, when it gets dark, we go home.’ It isn’t so much what we do that makes a day special but who we share it with. Life is so much more than the sum of our achievements. It’s more about relationships than accomplishments. The Bible points us to the most fundamental relationship of all, that of our relationship with the God who caused all of existence to exist.
Why are we here? It’s possible to have many answers to that question and yet miss the main point. Perhaps something to think about this summer as you watch the clouds loiter overhead.
Every blessing Graham Robinson
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