“What are we here for, anyway?”

“What are we here for, anyway?”

We all hear numerous times in our lives, “life is short.” “Life is hard.”

We think to ourselves, “yeah yeah” and keep going. At least I used to. I use to cringe inside when people would say that as though it were a “cop out” or an excuse for an easy way out to justify their lives.

As you are fully aware, the world we live in is full of pain. Life is just simply hard at times, yet it goes by so fast. Yet, at times, we feel we are spending our entire lives trying to figure out what we are doing here with our lives. We look back and life somehow becomes this beautiful journey from various shattered pieces.

We hear about all the negative and painful events in our world or in our individual lives and we hear that life is short, but how does it make us live different today? If life really is short, then why do we worry and spend our entire lives trying to figure out what we are here for? Why do we have so many trials in our lives? Ever wonder how someone could experience so much pain and challenges in ones life? Ever wish you could just be a little child again, when your greatest challenge in life was lemonade or fruit punch?

What if you were told you have nine months left to live, what would you do? Would you go crazy and do everything imaginable? Where would you go? Who would you go see? Would you rack up your credit cards and buy lots of things? Would you give money away to charities or to missionaries? Would you have self pity and complain to every person that you saw? Would you run from God? Would you run to God? Would you blow up and get mad at every one and God? Would you forgive others and settle unresolved issues with others? Would you re evaluate your life and decide what is most important to live for? Who would you spend your last months with? What would be the most important thing to you in your last nine months? How would you respond?

Okay, so those are just a few questions to get you thinking, as I am sure these are all valid questions we would all ask ourselves and wonder how we would respond, but many are never forced to face these questions. Or, wait, we will all die one day, right? Who is to say we will have one day or eighty years left? So, why wouldn’t we all be forced to face these questions for all our lives today?

So, you get the point. Quit wasting your life. Let’s think about what really matters and the whole point on why any of us ever exist.

Honestly, most of us do not want to think about dying unless we are 95 years old, then we might be ready to think about it. We would all agree that we will all one day die, but we do not want to think about today being our last day. We may think it sounds cliché and sounds nice to live today as though it were your last, but we do not really ever want to face the reality of life in this world taken away from us.

Will we let the mundane cares, stress, and pressures of the world defeat us? Will we let sickness control our lives? Will we let what a doctor predicts determine our destiny?

Samuel Gayton, my fiancé and best friend who died August 12, 2007 from a rare form of stomach cancer did not let his illness nor the statement that he was dying determine his destiny. He embraced his illness, looking to God for a miracle as he lived his last months in Waco, TX fighting for his life as he battled cancer. He won. This was his reason for living. Though many would question, how did he win if he died and was not healed on this earth?

Sam’s life was a battle and he won! Sam fought until the end because he trusted God. He never gave up. Sam was an over comer. He conquered death. Sam stood on the Word of God and the truth of who God is. God was his deliverer, redeemer and the healer of his body, mind, and soul. Sam believed God would heal him and that one day he would have a new body. God gave Sam more than he could ever ask or imagine. Sam found freedom and deliverance through his suffering as he fully embraced his season of hardship and rarely ever complained.

Sam fought the good fight of faith. In his last months, Sam exemplified the kind of faith the people in the Bible were commended for and that pleases the heart of God. We know that Sam will receive a great reward. Though his body was as good as death, Sam still believed God to heal him, literally till his last breath. This was his reason for living. Some of us are only given a few years. No matter the number of years, God can use one man’s life just as powerful in 25 years or 85 years.
Who is ready to die at age 24? No one. I sure was not ready to die at 24 years old. For most, we see it as life has just begun. We still have a whole lot of living to do. We have dreams to fulfill, challenges to conquer, and life to enjoy with others.

I ask God everyday, how anything good could come from Sam dying; my future dying, my best friend dying, my dreams dying, and a part of who I am dying? He has shown my how good has come out of it and continues to show me everyday. From out of the depths of pain comes greater strength to live today. For me, having a gut honest relationship with God was the only thing that helped to work out all the pain, heartache, confusion, and anger inside.

If you think about pain and how physically, the greatest athletes endure the greatest pain. The greater the pain that you endure the stronger you become. Not by just having pain, but by enduring the pain, embracing the pain.

For me, it was so important to embrace God in the pain. If we go through the hard times without God, we will look back and wonder where God was. We will look back at those times as if God abandoned us. There is rich revelation through the hardest times if we choose to embrace them. It hurts to embrace God in the pain, but it is worth it in the long run. Someone once told me that only in this life, we will have an opportunity to endure and embrace pain. There is no pain once we die. There is no pain in eternity. From that perspective, it makes it a little easier to be thankful for painful times and use it as an opportunity to endure the pain and to fully embrace it why we are here on Earth.

So, absolutely life is short and life is hard. I am not going to tell you why we go through pain and why life is hard and why life runs up so quickly, it is just the truth. We cannot waste our lives trying to figure out “why”, we just have to live life and make the most of it. We live in a broken, fallen, sinful world. Yet through it all, our lives can become a beautiful journey as we embrace our troubles and as we are aware that our daily decisions and what we choose to do with our time will determine our destiny. Once in for all, life is not all about us. If we focus more on others and love others, I am most definite we will be more happy and enjoy life as we were intended to.

What would our lives truly look like if we did not let our troubles and pain conquer our lives, but use them, embrace them, and see something beautiful emerge?

written by: Leah Williams May 2008