Why am I here?

I give thanks to God for all of you, because it’s through your conversion to Jesus Christ, that the testimony of your strong, persistent faith is spreading throughout the world. (Romans 1:8, TPT)

Resilient faith is so hard to come by. Off late I have been hearing many stories of how people lost faith. Like one of the foremost voices for sexual purity for the sake of the gospel in the 90s, Joshua Harris. These stories, though sad to hear points to a particular truth that pervades our generation. Living by faith is hard. Voices speaking for the lack of faith are plenty. It’s in every mainstream media, music and entertainment.

The question that I still ask myself, especially when I hear of stories like this is, “why do I still believe?”

Though this blog isn’t meant to be an exhaustive read of why I believe, I would like to mention one reason I have been thinking about.

Faith, for me, in crucial in the great human endeavor. For a lot of people, the only reason for faith is when we can’t do something physically or can’t understand something intellectually. “God is a watchman, a caretaker, a phenomenon that fills in the gaps of the inexplicable”. But the way I see it, God has always intended for humans to be so much more than they are today. Goodness, forgiveness, sacrifice, good leadership, creativity that furthers human capability and community – these things interest us. They are in our movies, in the short clips of videos we watch on Facebook (even if we have to suffer through 15 second commercials). The fact that we love them are cues to how we have been made. What we were intended for. The design. And as much as the maker of a laptop can understand the true potential of the device, the maker of the human being, the dreamer of the human potential and the universe, knows exactly what this life is all about – the question of “why am I here”?

To be known, to be loved is everyone’s greatest and deepest need. We feel it in the embrace of a child. I feel it in the love of my son even after I have been a less-than-perfect dad. That’s home. That’s the foundation of why we are here. Relationship. Our definitions of love spring from the One who is love – God. Many of us have many ideas of what God’s like. But I want to encourage you, the best way to know what God’s like is to look at the life of Jesus. He is God in the flesh, in action, living and moving among us.

He came to lead us to know what love is, to transform us and to make us the people we are created to be.

It’s easy to give up when things don’t go our way. When we fail and see no hope in sight. It takes persistence, resilience to keep walking. That’s what the Roman church in the verse above was known for. In the middle of a cosmopolitan, vice-filled, money-chasing era, they were known for their persistent faith.

Pray a simple prayer today, would you? Ask him to come into your life and lead you to become the YOU, you were meant to be.