The Original Templates

The Original Templates

Chapter 1: The Starting Point

Life is a journey with many pikes and stations. The greatest quest in life is to find the meaning of life itself. In fact, all of life as we live it is a quest to find the significance of our own existence. We all want life: our activities, our situations, and people around us to make sense. Everybody intends to find the meaning of life. We all live through unresolved dilemmas. We all carry around unanswered questions. We all live through unexplained events. The quest for meaning is the common denominator of every life lived regardless of age, tribe, location, and occupation. As we are going through life, we are always looking for answers to life’s most important questions. In life, we want to find the meaning of words, events, and experiences. We want to know the meaning of what was said to us. We want the reason why certain events happened to us, or why others didn’t happen. We want to make sense out of our life experiences. The word meaning has many great synonyms including sense, connotation, denotation, import, gist, significance, importance, and implication. Meaning is the thing someone or something intends to convey. Meaning is the effect of an unknown or unusual sense. It is the sense of a fact, an event, or an experience. Most of the things we do in life can be summed up as the quest for meaning. In fact, the middle part of the word life in itself is a big question “if.” If the “if” of your life is not resolved your life becomes meaningless. Unless we can find the meaning of life, then everything in life becomes pointless. It’s like a stillborn baby that is conceived and lost in darkness, never knowing life or understanding what it’s all about. But the fact that you made it into the land of the living means you had a starting point. Your life started at conception. The implication is that long before you got here, God marked out your origin, your tribe, your address, and the time of your existence for a worthwhile cause and an excellent reason. All the details of your life were all accounted for in the life of a man who once lived. Your book of record in which the story of your life was pre-written is the life of one man. The Bible says:

“And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’ as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ [Acts 17:26-28, ESV]

You put on all the sensibilities of a human at birth. Therefore, all your living in the world starts at birth. Your birth starts out your time on earth. Pre-birth life is meaningless, but post-birth life puts on meaning. The difference between pre-birth and post-birth is time. In pre-birth we can’t count your days on earth, that’s presumptuous. We counted the trimesters of your mother’s pregnancy of you, and that was enough. Post-birth, we number your days in the land of the living. Notice that finding meaning is attached to the overall meaning of your time spent here on earth. It is to be accomplished through personal discovery. That is, you seeking out the essence of your time here in the land of the living. Your ultimate accountability for your life is how you spent your time on earth.

The count of your days in a broken world is attached to the meaning of your life. To every birth, there is a reference date. In fact, the most compelling fact about your birth date is that it is a point of reference. Your birth day is a benchmark. It is an enduring coordinate to find the meaning of your life. Your birth day is a starting point. It’s the starting point of my life and your life in the domain in which we are birthed, that is the sphere of time and space. Therefore, the most enduring reference point of our lives is the day we were born. We think of our birth day as the day we started living. When we celebrate this anniversary, we are celebrating the day we started living. The most important thing about that birthday is that it is the reference point to the reason why you were born, the meaning of your life. Every day you write your birthday, it’s a reference point in time. Let’s say you were born on May 6, 1976. A month, a day and the year. The year is the larger point locating your birth in human history, and the day and the month is the particular location. The years as they come and go are all marked to another person, a man that once lived, on whom we date our days and count our centuries. Therefore, every moment, every event and every opportunity in your life is entirely accounted for in the central figure of human history. The reasons why God marked out our origins, our tribes, our addresses, and the times of our existence in this broken world are threefold: first, that we should seek Him; second that perhaps we should feel our way towards Him; and finally that we should find Him. That’s the purpose of human existence. Unless this search for God is undertaken and yields this kind of results, life is meaningless.

Solomon, King of Israel, the son of David, was the wisest man and the wealthiest man that ever lived. One of the greatest gifts he left mankind is a lifelong experimentation with everything that a human being can do to find meaning.