My own journey for my search for significance started in high school, when I would challenge my teachers about the purpose of needing to study Algebra, or Calculus, or some other such subject that didn’t seem to be important to real life, the one that people live after college.
I mean, at that time, I noticed that my parents didn’t even know the kind of Algebra that we were going through anymore. I know that my mother was into Accounting, being a manager of a hog farmers’ cooperative, and she and my father had had Algebra when they were younger, but nothing prepared them for the kind of Algebra that I was encountering on a daily basis. It was then that I had started to wonder whether the training I was getting from school was adequate for real life.
I just had to know the purpose of the stuff I was doing. Was there an end to all this? What is the purpose of life?
I had hated seeing how people worked to survive, then at the end of the day, feel so empty, because they didn’t live their lives with an end in mind. They just worked and worked and worked… To live. People complained about their poverty, their lack, and what I could see was that the lack was internal. Some of these people were materially wealthy, and yet… They are so poor in terms of the real wealth of life.
For me, life’s gems and richness are based on the richness of your relationships with people. To the extent that you can love someone, and are loved in return, to the depth of how lives were touched by you… That is how wealthy you are.
I finally found my purpose when I committed my life to Jesus in 2003. I had prayed the Sinner’s Prayer when I was ten, and I had a knowledge of who He is. But to commit my life for His purposes, that only happened in 2003. From that moment on, no matter how tough the journey had become at times, I was able to carry the most extreme of duress, simply because I knew that there was an objective to everything I was experiencing.
Maybe you won’t agree with me, because you tried religion and all you got out of it was heartache and more. But I guess the only thing I could attest to was the fact that with Jesus… I finally learned how to love.
This will be a series of articles on a person’s significance and the sources from where he or she derives it. Watch out for more!
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