Do we want God to bless our efforts or do we want to be a part of efforts God is blessing?

Do we want God to go with us, or do we want to go where He already is?

Do we want to know God’s will for our lives or do we want to know how our lives play a role in his will?

Do we want God to be on our side or would we rather be on His?

These questions are more than just a play a words or their ordering. They get at the heart of the age old existential question of why we exist, taking it one step further asking: does God exist for us or do we exist for God?

The idea of the creator of the universe existing for our fleeting pleasures is as preposterous as it is comical (not to mention heretical since He is existence). He was not made in our image, but we in His so that we reflect His glory, not the other way around. Everything begins and ends with Him, not us.

Many of us know that at an intellectual level (at least I hope). But this knowledge has fallen short in reorienting the way we live and think and move. We are a very selfish and prideful people. We seem to think that everything in life, including God, exists to serve us oblivious to the fact that our lives our just a microcosm in the grand scheme of things. We are just grains of sand – too innumerable to count individually. But together, we reflect before God a beautiful image on the shorelines of the beach.

We are like flowers of the field, here today and gone tomorrow. And yet God chose to sacrifice His son, for dust, not because we were worthy for we are not! Dust is not worth much. But for His namesake, and his glory and his great love toward us, He sent His Son while we were challenging Him and each other for His position and power.

We exist for God. So let us find where He is moving and be there. Let us discern where He is blessing, where His presence is and plant ourselves in that place. Let us ask the bigger existential question – what is God’s purpose and plan for the earth – and reorient our lives around that plan, abandoning every other that places us at the center instead of God. And perhaps we will find that life gets a little bit easier. Maybe it’s not as difficult, as taxing, as competitive, as draining as we have always imagined it to be. Maybe it’s not about building our individual kingdoms, our towers of Babel if you will, but building and proclaiming His kingdom as it exists now and forever will be. Not our names, not our success, not our jobs, not our careers, not even our vocation (which I need to remember), but Him and Him alone.