The Best Reason To Live

By Mesha Oh

He was now in his mid-50s. If you had seen him 30 years earlier, you might never have recognized him. He had been an almost completely different person altogether then. At that time, he was driven by a fiery passion to change the world. He had his share of private indulgences too—which had so possessed him that pursuing them had become his major purpose for living. But now, all that was a thing of what seemed to him to be a very distant past. When he thought about his younger days—which he did only very rarely—he could hardly identify himself with the person he had once been. It seemed to be someone else, not himself.

He had been through many ups and downs in life and had weathered many a fierce storm. Life had taught him numerous important lessons. As a result, slowly and imperceptibly, many of the things that he had once been so passionate about dropped out of his life, without his consciously willing them to. They had once provided his life a sense of purpose and meaning—something to live for—but when he thought of them now, he could only feel a sense of deep revulsion.

The goings-on in the wider world—stories of war, violence, cruelty, hate, corruption, misery, and so on—only added to his disenchantment. He no longer read the newspapers or watched television, but still, he did get news about some of the things that were happening in the world, things that only added to his sense of detachment.

If he had given up on many things that once so delighted him, there was one thing that remained: his faith in God, the Creator and Master of the worlds. In fact, over the years, his faith in God had grown and matured. As his interest in the things of the world had declined, his faith in God had grown more firm.

For him now, there was only one reason to remain alive. It was not for pursuing his private indulgences, as before, nor was it to seek to change the world. No! The only reason now why he felt it worthwhile to continue to remain alive was to serve God, to do God’s will for him. As far as he was concerned, nothing else could provide any purpose for him to continue to remain in the world, this ‘well of woes’.

He had now realised that the story of the purpose of man’s life on Earth was actually all about God’s purpose for us, and not the purposes we may choose to invent for ourselves.