Romans 3:23-24
23. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
24. Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
Who are you? Why are you here? What is the point of your existence? You live and breathe, you take up resources to survive, you experience fleeting thrills and seemingly prolonged suffering -- what is the point?
To be alive -- that is the point. Why chase your tail asking whether being alive is good or evil. You are alive. Take that in and trust it as a good, whether it feels good or not. Otherwise... otherwise your stressed confusion and whining is like the screeching of a cat in heat on a desert moon. And I will throw a shoe at you, you dumb, blind animal.
But... what is it to be alive? Is it merely to survive until death? Is it merely to experience joy and pain and then nothingness? No, I would call that survival, but certainly not living. To be alive -- to be truly and fully alive as a human being -- is to know... is to love... is to serve.... Serve? Do I mean that you do not exist for yourself alone? Yes, that's right. And until you understand and accept that, your being alive is merely survival with, at best, the perpetual licking of clean fur. To live fully is to live beyond your particular physical confines. To be truly alive is to give yourself away.
Which brings us back to the first question: who are you? You are an imperfect creature who will try for truth and goodness and who will fail. This means that you are a human creature. What you do with your failures will determine what kind of human creature you are. Will you dismiss the wonder of your babyhood when you figure out that no one disappears in a game of peekaboo? Will you abandon the hope of your childhood when the adult you love disappoints you and you experience heartache for the first time? Will you neglect the ideals of your youth when your first project to help others falls short of your goal and you realize that anything worthwhile takes continuous hard work for even partial success? Will you destroy love when an intimate relationship loses its thrust, cutting it down before the hard fruit has ripened? We humans wonder, hope, believe, love... and fall short of that wonder, hope, belief and love for which we strive... but, then... we try again. If we don't perpetually reach for the glory of that higher goodness, if we let our failures end us, then we do not truly live. We are not fully human, fully alive, unless we fall -- and rise.
Who are you? You are the promise of glory. You are the tiny seed of divine fruit. You are designed to give yourself over... over to innocent wonder, to trusting hope, to generous ideals, to maturing love that grows richly in all these things. All of us human beings have fallen short of this. You and I continually miss the mark and fall into self gratifying narcissism. As if the point and reason for all of the universe is my momentary thrill. As if being itself loses value if I experience pain. Why don't I rise? I may be weighted down by crippling disease, unable even to lift my head, but I am a human being, I am alive, and I have the grace to rise up in the depth of my being, unafraid, unchained, fed by struggle to be strengthened in the ability to truly and fully live. Who am I? I am yours... and I am here because of love...
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