Life

My sister and I are talking as we are traveling back home after attending a young adults gathering from our church. We rode into a utility vehicle and sat on the utmost end of the seat. As we are moving, my sister is scrolling her smartphone and she blurted out about those people who took suicide last week.

To my curiosity, I asked her what their backgrounds were. She told me that these people are rich and famous at the same time, well-known and are talented in doing their line of expertise.

We are continuously exchanging our personal viewpoints about how did these people made suicide a way of escapism for them.

After all that we discussed, we agreed on a fact that we’re grateful enough to realize that inspite of what we have experienced before and what we will be going through in our lives in the future, we will never consider it as an option.

That the upbringing that we had gives the credit to our parents who are God-fearing and instilled to us the importance of living a life that is dependent on God. And we cannot imagine our lives if we live it apart from Him. Grateful enough also to say that we have a family and great (but few close) friends that we can be honest to talk to. Aside from them, there’s this Higher Being that we believe we can talk to, someone Whom we can cast our burdens, someone Who can listen, and someone Who can penetrate the anxieties of our hearts when we’re down and frustrated at times.

And only in Him, we have Life.

A life that may not be perfect but a life worth living for. A Life that may not be extravagant but a life well-lived for. A life that may seem so unfair but not defeated. A life by this world’s definition would be success, fame, riches and possessions, but by God’s definition, is found in His Son.

In the middle of these realizations, my sister is talking simultaneously with her best friend on messenger having same discussions about depression. Then, as she let me read their conversation, I found out that he had tendencies of suicide back then.

After reading all of those exchanges of messages, I told my sister to send him this following sentences.

“Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son does not have life.”

It added the emphasis on what my sister and I talking about and said to her that where else can a man find life apart from Him? After a few minutes, her friend replied with a smiling face with it.

Oh, how foolish and deceiving it is for a man to define this life alone on what an individual does, attains, achieves and what it is happening, moving, and passing under the sun. Yet in the end, he will still find himself empty and void.

Where in fact, life will have its meaning when it is connected above it where Someone lives and is desperately wanting to reside and live in the inside of us. And our life will never lose its significance when it is anchored to the One who gives life in this ocean of reality when lived apart from Him counts to vanity.

This is only attainable in having a personal and experiential relationship with Jesus.

And His Spirit of truth (as part of the benefits of having Him) never wavers throughout the ages to let this simple truth occur in the minds and the hearts of every individual when situations and circumstances come in whatever state all of us could be whether it may be high or low, happy or sad, success or failure, fruitfulness or barrenness, fullness or lack that I myself am privileged to receive to serve as a reminder in this generation.

And it is this.

There is only God-sized vacuum in our lives that only He can fill. Not success, not fame, not achievements, nor riches, nor worldly fulfillment, nor anything.

Not even death.

6/8/2018