Why Am I Why I Am?: Thirty-Two Riveting Questions on What Life Means

By David Lee

Everyone wants to uncover their identity, discover what this earthly existence actually means and what to do with the life presented them. But their origin, process of living, and destiny are wrapped in such mystery that life can be a blur. Is purpose something that each individual must create? Do we live for the expectations of others? Or is there a Maker that has a design to fulfill in us? Why Am I Why I Am? asks thirty-two probing questions in order to describe the complexities we face in our culture and clarify the reasons for why we are here now and where we are headed next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098028671

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Question Number 1

The Great Me Mystery: Can I Be Explained?

My mystery, meaning, and Maker

Life is a mystery indeed, both fascinating beyond the reaches of our imagination and troublesome because of its manifest inconsistencies. On the one hand, our curiosity desires to unlock the secrets to the puzzle called life, and if we live long enough, we propose to ourselves that we may find the right key. We take notes on the universe, uncover as many rocks as we can, investigate, research, test, and form conclusions on about everything that we think is possible to observe. But on the other hand, we cannot seem to get answers for bigger questions than why air is thinner in higher places or how two elements mixed together can ignite. How do bones that have been broken grow back together? How does a seed that has been sitting around for five years spring into a plant that bears twelve tomatoes when placed into a pot of dirt, add water?

That is the physical level of curiosity, but the questions inside us grow larger. What about moral and ethical issues? We are taught by our culture that there is a seed of potential goodness inside each of us just waiting to blossom into greatness. Yet we writhe over the presence of evil in what seems otherwise to be a world with some good stuff in it. And yet the earth itself bears such frightening potential as to wipe out civilizations with wind, water, fire, cold, and desert heat. What kind of a world has God constructed, and how can it be both good and bad?

Perhaps the greatest mystery is ourselves, for we swing from euphoria to moods of full depletion, drooling for pleasure, dreading pain, exalting youth where enthusiasm may lack maturity. And when we live long enough to acquire wisdom, we dread our accumulated years, fearing old age like walking on the precipice of a slippery high cliff.

If we commence with the idea that God really exists, planned and purposed the universe He subsequently created, then we are left with an even greater sense of perplexity. Why? Because we have to admit that we are an integral part of that grand enterprise, tiny as a speck, but perhaps more important than anything else in existence besides God. Nothing to our knowledge has the same capacity to think, love, choose right or wrong, invent, discover, construct. We examine a mountain sculpted from the force of water over time, but what else can it do? The average person can put together a sandwich instantly or within a few months erect a bridge with a crew of other workers, play a video game or read a novel. Can a star or meteor or a fish send an e-mail or swing a baseball bat at a split-finger fastball?

Almost any creature of our environment we scrutinize with wonder for its origin, essence, shape, and function bear remarkably absorbing intrigue. The jellyfish lights the public aquariums like neon Christmas ornaments, but appears to propel itself to nowhere, yet can sting a fleshy human hand mercilessly. If it has no purpose, then why does it have built-in protection? The migration of geese thousands of miles from their domicile only to return in the favorable springtime to the same locale boggles our intelligence. But we the creatures that the Bible suggests resemble God are the most complex and mysterious of all things made.

God obviously can comprehend us, but we cannot comprehend Him. He is too mysterious to observe or judge rightly, except in the quantity of which He has revealed Himself for us to know. In the Bible Job 11:7 queries, Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? Yet He has made us to be mysterious too, and understanding either God or us demands faith. Does it disturb us that we have advanced our civilization through the tests of time and learning, but we have limitations to our achievements? We figure that the cancer answer is just around the corner. After all, we can shorten the life of a common cold, but have we cured it yet? Get a flu shot, we are instructed and thousands who do die anyway.

We cringe that we cannot make all right moral choices. So like the society around us we tend to settle for the next best choice—to redefine morality as being relative to individual or community thought, rejecting any absolute nature of rightness, leaving it to each to decide. In this scenario some actions are simply mistakes, some are misdemeanors, and the grievous slipups are felonies. Thus the small misdeeds will pass (no harm, no foul), because relative thinking takes us off the hook; we are bound to no one, we make our own rules. Take that approach, and it infers that society does not have any basis for establishing any binding laws for the people in its various districts. Everyone can redefine the laws of a community to suit personal or group preference. But how can society be regulated if there is no established standard to create a rule to which every person must adhere? The problem is, even if we concocted our own morality, we would still be unable to live consistently by our own standard. Guilt still haunts us, even when we made our choice to do something we convinced ourselves was right by our own relative standard. Someday we will offend our self-made rules, then what? Shall we shrug, smile tight-lipped, and continue the back nine of our golf outing?

Self-made morality has its glitches

No. We cannot hide in the basement from our mistakes. We become disgusted that we trusted a friend who betrayed us. Were we not savvy enough to discern dubious character? We should have capped our foul words in the fit of emotion that brought someone to tears, for our vow to ourselves was to guard our speech. We secretly are terrified of what we are capable of destroying in the eye of a wary circumstance. Would we ever be angry enough to take our frustration out on another person, inflicting bodily injury? Are we capable of gambling away something extremely valuable, such as a spouse, by entering a forbidden encounter? Can we ever cease giving in to the person society is forcing us to become? Would we ever accept the person with another skin and different religion who hates our politics and means us harm? Would we ever reach a saturation level of tolerance to the point we give up on our own child? Would we ever lie to the church to save face? Would we?

If we know ourselves this well, in spite of all our good intentions and religious irreversible vows, we have seen ourselves make horrific errors, things that we would ardently condemn in others. And that feeble moral weakness makes us inordinately mysterious. Nations of the world are battling terrorism, and our own country is ripped asunder by constant internal conflicts, racial hatred, corruption in leadership, political division and chaos, and threats of war by other nations. We have already seen flagrant brutality waged from fanatical religious extremism, so another car bomb or school massacre causes us to bob our heads sideways, so we get both frightened and immune. Those who oppose war of any kind may be noble but cannot reconcile terrorist advances upon innocents. Yet the solution is to resist the use of force to retard more inhumane activity. Banking on verbal or economic sanctions, they figure on talking the perpetrators out of committing to genocide or try to get them to confess, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. Are we looking for humility in the form of a very remorseful apology for the bloodshed? Who are we kidding?

Mister dictator, could we get together, sir, and discuss your mass murder?

Leaders who have had to wage war to stop war justify their decisions by saying that more lives will be saved in the big picture. But what negotiation or proactive use of weapons has ever put an end to evil? Wars have been halted, but not greed, hunger for power, or incorrigible evil. Unless we are completely sightless, every dead soldier is somebody’s son, daughter, husband or wife, mother or father. The truth is, doing nothing or doing something has dire consequences, resulting in the ultimate perplexing mystery of man. Why do people behave so badly if they are inherently good?

I suppose one of our chief mysteries is the utter closeness our life is to death. We are talking just one breath, a heartbeat, a momentary lapse, turning the head to read a road sign and ending up in the passing lane in the path of a semi. The then what comes up, and we have to sit and contemplate the vast gap between the earthly life we now see and the vague misty ocean of the unknown, which, because we have not come up with a better term, we call afterlife. There’s life, and then afterlife—how ingenious! As we sit on this rock with our fist under our chin, thinking deeply, what if anything qualifies us to enter into a better afterlife? What can we extract from this one that guarantees a next? If the next is, indeed, better, do we deserve it? Is there, indeed, a connection to how we behave now and what we become then?

To avoid dealing with the deeper questions regarding who we really are and where we are headed, we stay busy. It helps to keep our minds off mystery. We would rather engage in a fashion show so that we have some new puffy prim style to discuss with others. We collect all the stats on every pro football player to be able to compete in the next fantasy showdown between the two top teams when the guys huddle around the satellite dish. I’ll give Dallas two-to-one odds, while my soul is being shredded by the incomprehensible mystery of why many innocent people die young. Why do the old have to linger in intolerable suffering? We convince ourselves that entertainment will cause our quandaries to disappear.

God talks about mystery too

We are enshrouded in mystery, and if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have life. The renowned King Solomon concluded in Ecclesiastes 7:24, Whatever wisdom may be, it is far off and most profound—who can discover it? And further in 8:1, Who is like the wise man? Who knows the explanation of things? The great apostle Paul spoke of God unwrapping the divine mysteries that have been hidden from the beginning of creation. He wrote that His salvation is now offered to all mankind, both Jew and Gentile alike, and that to have Jesus Christ inside us is our very hope of glory in afterlife (see Ephesians 2:11–22).

God remains a mystery on purpose. He has revealed enough of Himself to rescue us from this morally fickle, unsolvable earthly life, but we must always be in the posture of seeking to know the celestial mysterious Author of life as part of that rescue. In other words, the more knowledge we gain of the God of mystery, our present enigmas become reduced. Not that we necessarily have to find answers to our riddles, but we have hope that they will eventually be resolved, and we can live in faith happily when babies are born with an incurable heart problem and earthquakes wipe out a city.

Can we settle on the established axiom that we were made by God to be a mystery? When we discover this to be true, will we throw some kind of blame back in His face and insist that all that we are about we can and will eventually corral, and thus be able to control? Or will we step down from our balcony to ground level, where all mankind was born by His mind, and plead like the psalmist in Psalm 119:18, Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law? Mystery in a person overwhelmed by it may cause the mind to scream and warp. But would it not be better when all our unexplained riddles are encountered to reach out the hand like a child to his dad in a dark corridor and walk the next step secured by the strength of the One who knows the route? He knows that at the end of the darkness is a beautifully painted vista—a greater mystery saved up to bring us unto uncharted wonder.

Our culture insists that the self is the center of the universe. We don’t need any outside transcendent help. We have all the science and technological and educational tools to recreate and manage our own destiny. Did you mark true or false to that last statement? But are we really an isolated tree without a forest, and are we attaining the superior self we wish we were?

We try to draw a straight line with a crooked pencil.

You say, Well, I can do that.

But if it has no lead?

I’ll find some. I can buy and I can borrow.

But you broke your fingers.

I’ll use my nonwriting hand. I need not be limited. I’ll find a way.

In the dark?

I’ll resort to the flashlight in the drawer.

With no batteries?"

I carry matches.

But your matches are wet.

I’ll rub sticks together.

But you have none.

I can write in the dark.

What will you write on the line?

Whatever my spirit feels like saying.

But your spirit is dead.

I’ll revive my spirit.

By yourself?

Maybe someone will come by and help me.

Does anyone want to?

Maybe.

If not?

And that’s the point. Someone needs to come by and help or we will never resolve our dilemmas. Our effort to reconcile the larger ultimate issues hits a wall we cannot climb. There is Someone who knows, feels, cares, is willing, and very capable. Someone much higher than us. Can we handle the mystery of me alone?

So what is the meaning of meaning?

Monty Python did a parody called The Meaning of Life. Life was portrayed in comedic fashion as absurd. The writers were saying that as long as we can laugh at everything, including God, we are born funny and end silly. Paul Tournier wrote a book titled The Meaning of Persons. Tournier speaks of a man who approached him for counsel, declaring, I’m looking for life. I am not living a real life at all.

Tournier wrote in response, The agony of it has pursued him everywhere year after year. There is nothing in all that but a façade, a caricature, a mere appearance of life. His memories pour out, full of that agonizing impression of meeting, not men, but more or less artificial personages, and the worst agony of feeling that he is himself caught up in the game, so that he can never be spontaneous, simple, and true.

The visitor to the Swiss psychiatrist continued, Only on rare occasions have I succeeded when I have been in love. And even then the spell was broken almost at once, because I realized that it was not really love I was looking for, but life; love was just one more pretense (The Meaning of Persons, Harper and Row Publishers: New York and Evanston, 1957, p. 29).

Which drives a nail into the board. Much of what we call life is playing a part in life in order to fit around others. It may not be the real me saying aloud what I feel, or honestly assessing myself or my surroundings, but greeting someone’s expectations with a caricature of me that will satisfy them momentarily.

It is somewhat analogous to real pain and perceived pain. Perceived pain is real pain to those who are hypersensitive to anything emotionally or physically unusual. Merely the thought of discomfort brings about discomfort, so that psychological pain becomes physical. It is the stage version of real life, and that is often the rendition of what we present to ourselves. So I say, I can live with this shed snake skin, because I have trained myself to adjust to a life of accommodating the circumstances. I can go home and sleep on it and start anew the next day, rearranging my real self in order to acquiesce to a peaceful encounter with others, but again only portraying an outer semblance of something not me.

Do we have meaning without the interaction with other people? What if we were born isolated from any contact with persons, just dropped off into a vacuous netherworld alone? Would we weep because there is no one to affirm our being? Or would we substitute fish, birds, stones, dirt, trees, and sky for other humans? Or would we not know that we should weep being alone? Mostly, we would admit to the need of the presence of others to ratify us. But we realize that a game plays itself out in the forms of decorum, social mannerisms, fear of exposing too much regarding our secrets, grandiose expectations, accidental occurrences that change our behavior, and pressure that comes from someone else’s loaded personality.

A rare find is a friend among the galaxies of humans who accepts the real me, flawed or renovated, and is not insisting that I be kind rewind. Dealing with truth, I come with my preferences too, for I have learned that not everyone’s expectations of me are for my welfare, and some to my detriment.

How people and circumstances make our meaning

On occasion we surprise people, for they did not know what we were capable of doing. They did not realize we could jump five feet over a fence or quote Thanatopsis or do a fingertip push-up or unscramble a Rubik’s cube. They did not know us well enough before to award us meaning. Now they acknowledge that we have done a feat in their presence that they will remember. It gives us meaning that someone else recognizes us by something we performed.

Most people do not know our history, that we were the girl in the third grade that got to play the lead in Little Miss Marvelous or that we broke a tibia on a motorcycle at seventeen or that we had an overpowering mother or that we were the only one left off the swim team. They assign to us a person according to the limited scope of what they see, or some rendition of what they want us to be. They may form an opinion of us, because we remind them of someone they once knew. If that memory is of a scoundrel, we are already on a blacklist. We may have been the first one chosen for a softball team on the playground where we used to live and the last at the gym class when we moved to another state, until we got the chance and hit a home run second time we batted. Then we got back some of the meaning we thought we deserved.

But is that what we mean by meaning? They may say, Sing that song again. Listen, Martha, you gotta hear this song. At first it was the novelty that I could sing, novel to them, not me. And then the novelty got transferred to the song. It is the song that becomes the prize, because it sounds like something they enjoy hearing and they simply became acclimated to the singer, who seems on their priority list to drift off into anonymity.

Remember Kobe? Let’s say Kobe hit 30 points four games in a row, but used his teammates the next and got only 22 and 8 assists in the win. But Kobe got perceived as ordinary due to the fact that, in his admirers’ eyes, he was not extraordinary. He drained a mere 22. Not very Kobe-like. Not Kobe-esque. And now absent from the NBA, who’s Kobe? We’re left with no Kobe-isms to discuss, because it appears that one failure reduced Kobe to mortality, and we are unwilling to allow icons to slip that far. It is not about Kobe but his scorecard and the fact that age and injuries swept him off the hardwoods. For four games he meant more than the one game. So he had to rationalize in his press conference, because his meaning diminished in the sight of his fan club.

Worse, LeBron came on the scene and equaled or outequaled Kobe. Then Kobe became Kobe who? Then we imagine that LeBron, after ten games over 30 points, scored a measly 22, and people asked, Who’s Michael Jordan? And Steph challenged LeBron for a season or two. Then KD got scanned for greatness and Kawhi and more ands. And replacements continue to outdo Bird and Magic who…? Wilt? Don’t flowers do that? Do we only mean something for a season then vanish?

What we do can have meaning if it emanates from who we are. We’ve heard it many times: We are not what we do that makes us important but who we are. And for some doer out there, that is a mouthful of sugarless cheesecake. And saying something like that itself is an issue to consider. Do we have to be important, or merely feel important, to have meaning? What we do never reaches who we are, for who we are is our actual being. We would still be even if we did nothing. We are each a person, which we say is much more important than what we do. What we do will never go to heaven, except in faith that God created us for His pleasure, and by faith we embrace the Christ and His cross. That is the only work relating to eternity that counts—the work that Christ has done for us, when He died in our place for our transgressions, and the work of faith by us that follows the prescription to enter heaven when we depart here. But even at that, God has to give us that faith to trust Jesus.

Ephesians 2:8–9 states, For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any person should boast. Salvation is God’s gracious gift, but faith is something He gave too, else we could brag that my faith caused me to be saved. Might as well say, I changed God’s mind. He was going to allow me to die in my sin for eternity, but I changed His mind when He saw my faith. Our doing doesn’t qualify us for heaven, and our deeds are but a part of our being. Alone they will not transport us into the presence of God, but having yielded to the pleasure of God, we will have shown Him that we love Him back by faith.

What we do in life can separate us from a person or many who do not have our skill set. Some have our skills and maybe better, but their performance of them is not who we are. And their performance of them better than what we do does not make them more essential than we. And when they insist that we must be better at our skills or we will not achieve a high enough fulfillment, saying that never causes us to be less than what we are, for we belong to God.

The question, as it pertains to meaning, is not limited to who we are, but also to Whom we are. When we start with ourselves, we miss the solutions as to why we are a mystery, because God made us and left us mysterious, just as He is mysterious and cannot fully be grasped. But we can know of Him as much as He has revealed and more by returning to Him in repentance for sin and in faith come to love Him as the most important and necessary Being of our life. For uncoiling the mystery called life, we dare not start and end with ourselves, but with the One Who made and loves us. That priority is the only life that makes sense.

Again, we deem our significance in relation to other people. God first, others next, and never the other way around, but certainly next. However, it is not exclusively what we do that others recognize about us, but also what they do, evoking a response in us that helps form our meaning. A mother in Indonesia has a baby and we hear about it, but it does little to sculpt meaning in us, because it is a fact of such miniscule impact upon us. It does have a tiny dot of meaning, because we hear it stated or read about it, and supposedly we remember everything we experience, hidden either deep in the recesses of our brain or somewhere close to the surface, where it can be recalled. We would assume that the accumulation of everything we experience shapes us.

But if a burglar breaks into our house while we are asleep and awakens us, we will remember it for life and jerk awake fearfully each time we hear a perceptible noise downstairs in the middle of another sleep. If a governing body raises taxes, it will affect the way we look at money or government. When we go to the gas pump and realize that, with escalating oil prices, the world is in trouble, it also reflects how we look at eggs or purchasing the next pair of shoes or what we allow ourselves to give to charity. If a woman in Indonesia has a baby, but the baby left unattended dies from falling off a changing table, it will make our meaning, because we have established a sympathetic opinion of the incident. What if it were my baby? It fixes itself in our memory, and what we remember becomes meaning.

Tears shape our meaning, and so does laughter. We laugh because we need relief from life, and too much laughter at once brings tears. But tears of remorse or sadness sometimes curtail hope and cause our world to be suspect.

When an alcoholic father with a flagrantly abusive temper harms our spirit, we will always remember the ominous presence of danger in alcoholism, fear those bigger than us, and have a picture frame of father in our memory bank. Some have great difficulty sorting out a God picture from a heinous earthly father picture when the Heavenly Father is mentioned. Having been shown the distinction through Scripture regarding the love of our wondrous God, He yet may be viewed stoically with less trust because of our conditioned impression of father.

Grades in school were the definition of us as a person. Academic grades meant that we were a success or a failure. The educators said that we were not failures, per se, for bad grades, but that we did not try hard enough and should have done more. However, we remember Butch who failed the first and second grades. Yet we remember stalling out at the kitchen table over a geometry puzzle we could not unscramble, weeping in frustration, while Dad or Mom yelled louder that it was easy, What’s the matter that you can’t get it? Or they said, Can’t help you, son [daughter]. Didn’t do good in geometry either. But you’ll do better than I did.

We culled meaning from that, for we failed at home and school, carrying with us the thought that I am dumb because math was a killer. It made us dumb across the board—if math, then speech, mechanical skills, social graces, or even spirituality. Red check marks in the sixth grade were merely emblematic that life itself is multiple choice or essay and that we are measured by the percentage of how many things we are able to get right. And we were hoping that God might grade on the curve because other people are more or less in the same section of the grade book as we, and some are worse off and truly in need of a tutor. We still hoped to be able to walk the stage in heaven when the diplomas were distributed, because we did some extra credit, like attend church, mouthed some prayers, and put a little good, hard-earned money into the offering plate.

We learn from a cafeteria of teachers over time, and what we are taught impresses what we come to accept as meaning. Hurt or harm is a powerful instructor. The finger in the wall socket, the tumble from running too fast downstairs, the grabbing hold of the metal part of the hot skillet navigated where to go and where not. When the brunette with the clear brown eyes and the unusually white enticing smile suddenly found a broad-shouldered football player to warm up to instead of you, you learned that life is drastic, something that you cannot shrug off. When you sat home and no guy asked you to the prom, equality and fairness took on a complete new set of values, and you learned to read whole books. We assessed from such bewildering occasions where to go and where not to go with people.

The next-door neighbor who treated you respectfully and liked jokes one day had to move out of the house apart from his wife and kids, because evidently, a divorcee two streets over was having his baby. Then your world became fractured and vague, and you discovered that you were part of it. Other people’s experiences proctored your exam. Life came to mean a certain definitive on trust, safety, order, harmony, and loyalty due to others.

Smoking your first cigarette behind the garage with the neighbor kid took you to an exotic isle and a dark cave of exciting fear simultaneously. Those short paper straws filled with dried leaves lit on fire that made smoke come out of your nose and mouth didn’t even taste good and left a hot foul residue on your tongue and palate. But you learned that participation in the forbidden held intrigue. However, when your mother smelled something burning, you learned that it was painful to sit on the consequences. It meant that on one shelf were the right