Out of Focus

I’m some­times over­whelmed at try­ing to under­stand man — not human­ity in gen­eral, but man in sin­gu­lar… the crea­ture, the being that each of us is.

We’re assailed from all sides with explanations,

that we have free will, that we are sub­ject to fate or pre­des­ti­na­tion, or that our actions are the mere results of a nearly infi­nite chain of chem­i­cal & phys­i­cal reactions,

that we ought to live for oth­ers or that we ought to look out for Num­ber 1 first,

that our exis­tence is inten­tional, that we’re the result of past lives rein­car­nated, or that we’re sim­ply the result of an ancient bio­logic chain,

that we exist… or not.

Every sin­gle point — no mat­ter how small — of each of those posi­tions could be debated at length, and may very well be until we’re extinct… or until we gain preter­nat­ural knowl­edge in an after­life state (even the end of the debates is debatable!).

All of that is just one of the many rea­sons why I believe the study of God to be so impor­tant. When we can under­stand Him (well, as best as we are intended based upon rev­e­la­tion), most other ques­tions can be answered in short order.

So if one day you wake to find your­self in an exis­ten­tial quandary full of loathing and self-doubt and wracked with the pain and iso­la­tion of your piti­ful mean­ing­less exis­tence, at least you can take a small bit of com­fort in know­ing that some­where out there in this crazy old mixed-up uni­verse of ours there is a God who brings sense to con­fu­sion and order to chaos yet still can pay atten­tion to a lowly, unde­serv­ing crea­turely speck known as man.

Each and every one of us.