What for?

"The awful question: What for? which had shattered all his intellectual edifices in the past, no longer existed for him. To that question: What for? a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair of a man's head falls."

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Yeah, we've all thought it. probably more than once. WHAT FOR? Why am I even alive? what's the point? do I matter at all? and more than once, you've probably come to the conclusion... pointless. pointless. like the constant barrage of rain on a rooftop. it's pointless.

Qoheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, agrees: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” (Ecc. 1:2) See? There's just pointlessness. Day after day, it's all the same. We go on, going on, living this painful life. I see people every day, living this pointless life, pointlessly. They don't know why they live so they just do anything to try to get some sort of meaning. If this is all there is, I'd better live it up while I can...right? 


One of the main characters in War and Peace, Pierre, has the world: A beautiful and glamorous wife, so much money he can't spend it fast enough, and the ability to do whatever he wants. So he does do whatever he wants, and every day is tormented by "Why am I living?" because it didn't fulfill. Only at the end of the book, when his life has been stripped of everything and he lives as an army prisoner, does he find what he's looking for. In that simplicity, suffering exists, yet God exists as well -- and God is bigger. Because there is certainty in who God has revealed himself to be, we can have purpose, even if we don't know what's going to happen in this life.

"Two things I know: that he is good, and he is strong."
~(Author unknown)