Finding Meaning Doesn’t Require Striving
Since I was seven, I’ve had the long-term view of life in mind. You know, that view of the future where there’s a threshold of experiences and achievements to reach, beyond which you’re satisfied. Where the angst of not belonging was over, the aspiration of being a world-improving scientist was achieved, and I could finally stop worrying—that heart thumping 3 o’clock in the morning type of worry—about how to get there or if I would ever get there. Yet I’ve never really got there.
Implicit in my impatient anticipation was the rather idealistic—yet also burdensome notion—that worldly life could satisfy the longings of the human heart. Satisfaction via worldly goals is pretty compelling, after all. The experience of love, of achievements, and of commitment to a purpose give a wonderful “thrill,” to use C.S. Lewis’s term. The thrill of transcending daily existence and seemingly encountering something bigger than the material world that humans so crave.
But for me, the thrill never lasted. Limerence waned, achievement bred crippling expectation for more success, and a lack of accomplishment became food for despair. Causes that once beckoned as a purpose let me down or faded in their seductiveness over time. I saw the ephemeral nature of my joy. and, now that I was trained as a secular scientist, the love undergirding that joy was just an atomic accident of molecules in my brain. Everything became meaningless.
Questions of Meaning—Secular Answers
The secular world could not answer my questions of meaning. Claims to the contrary were hollow because the things in which the secular world situated meaning faded and died. “Find someone to love,” “focus on working for a purpose,” “cheer up,” I was told.
“I loved my family but they would die—some of them did. I loved my work, but what, ultimately, would work achieve? ”
I loved my family but they would die—some of them did. I loved my work, but what, ultimately, would work achieve? Would love, work, or chasing elusive happiness ever be enough? People who had gained much more than me were not suddenly satisfied.
A simple perusal of newspapers and magazines, documenting high suicide rates, relationship breakdowns, and the general ennui of the rich and famous could tell me that these things did not satisfy. But still, I strived.
There was, however, a bigger problem. If we really were just material beings and our consciousness the result of certain synaptic firings that themselves were a result of a random combination in the primordial ocean four billion years ago, then our feelings of meaning didn’t mean anything anyway. Those “thrilling” feelings of love, pleasure, and purpose were not indicative of touching something greater (like it felt), but an illusion. The realization that my concept of meaning itself was a mirage sucked dry any motivation that escaped my panic, extinguishing my spirit in its slip wind and leaving a withered husk of a person.
C.S. Lewis famously said:
You can’t except in the lowest animal sense, be in love . . . if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties . . . are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. (On Living in an Atomic Age in Present Concerns, cited by Timothy Keller in The Reason for God, 141)
But it’s not an illusion we actually live out—even if we claim to believe it. No one actually lives like love doesn’t matter, like people don’t matter. But this, as Tim Keller says, is the natural conclusion if our origin is the result of randomness (“The Problem of Meaning,” sermon preached at Redeemer Presbyterian church on May 31, 1992).
Questions of Meaning—Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes demolishes the flimsy notions of meaning expounded by the secular world. The ancient book rebukes the idea that lasting meaning and worth can be found in the things of the world. Such attempts try and squash eternity into the lumpenly finite. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” (NIV) or “Vanity of vanities!” (ESV), “a chasing after the wind,” the author forcefully says of humanity’s fixation on worldly goals (Eccl. 1:2, 14) while at the same time pinpointing the reason for our experience of elusive meaning:
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end. (3:11)
We sense and desire eternity, which lasts longer and is bigger than us, but cannot comprehend or find this transcendence in or by ourselves:
When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the activity that is done on the earth . . . Even though a person labors hard to explore it, he cannot find it; even if a wise person claims to know it, he is unable to discover it. (8:16–17)
Meaning Imparted Eternally
Instead of being found in the world, our meaning and worth are imparted by the eternal God at creation to every person. The beginning of wisdom, of finding this meaning, says Ecclesiastes, is to “fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13).
There is great comfort here. My ultimate meaning and worth already exist and so do not depend on what I feel, do, or achieve.
There is also fear. For isn’t to “fear God and keep his commandments” to feel and to do? Aren’t these just more goals towards which I must ceaselessly strive? Chasing certain feelings and levels of obedience or “achievement”?
No. We are called to these things not to gain our meaning but because meaning comes as a gift from the hand of God (2:24; 9:1–9). As God’s creation, our highest flourishing results when we do what God designed us to do—love and obey him. It is a response to what we already have, not something we do in order to gain, grasping and desperate for a level of “goodness” we can never reach.
For, indeed, we cannot love and obey properly. Since the fall, our hearts naturally turn away from God and towards ourselves. Again and again in the Old Testament, we see the failure of humans to keep the commandments of God and live in trusting faith and obedience to him.
The Hope of the Gospel
For a perfectly just God, such disobedience must have consequences—and it did. Jesus took those consequences with him to the cross, took the consequences of our sin, and fulfilled the law in obedience which he then transferred to us (Acts 5:31; Rom. 8:2–4). By looking to him, we are seen as fulfillers, as sinless. The Law of the Old Covenant where boxes of “achievement” had to be ticked is gone, and the New Covenant asks only that we look to the right place where the Law has been fulfilled.
Having the correct orientation to God and meaning is vital; doing a sufficient amount of loving and obeying is not the point. When we look to and trust—have faith in—Christ, we find our worth and meaning. Even faith the size of a tiny mustard seed is superior to and can grow more lasting and powerful than faith in any of the ephemeral things of this world (Luke 17:6).
So, we do not need to fear that finding our meaning requires yet more striving.
Further relief comes with knowing the very nature of living in a world we were not created for means we will not always feel fulfilled and happy. Jesus was anguished in the garden, despite his perfect faith. He felt anger, sorrow, and fear during his earthly life (Matt. 26:37–39; John 2:15).
“Even faith the size of a tiny mustard seed is superior to and can grow more lasting and powerful than faith in any of the ephemeral things of this world.”
And we will too.
Knowing that I don’t have to do certain things or feel a certain way to have meaning is a huge encouragement. I don’t need to strive to belong because I already belong—when Jesus said, “Come to me” (Matt. 11:28). Here now, I must “run with endurance the race that lies before us.” Endurance implies it will not always be easy. I will sometimes feel discouraged, but that’s why we must always fix our “eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:1–2).
For that focal point is the nourishing long-term view, a view that will not fade.
Does knowing this make all worldly desires and 3 a.m. panic attacks go away? Not always. Not for me, anyways. Yet realizing and cultivating a correct view of God helps me to stop striving in my own strength. When the energy-sapping urgency of striving relaxes, recalling God’s unfading purposes gives us enough pause to turn and see that what we most need has already been done—and cannot be undone. God imparted our worth and meaning when he created us, and we can look forward to fully seeing this unfading purpose of his timeline with joyful hope.
Jessica T. Miskelly lives in Australia with her husband and two daughters. She was shown true Christian belief by leaders who engaged difficult questions. She relishes being surrounded by a loving church family as well as many teapots and books.