I am a thinker and sometimes I find myself pondering the age old philosophical questions many before me have wondered. What is life all about?
Well in my experience everyone answers this question differently and often tries to persuade others to their answer.
Life is about love…
Life is about success…
Life is about family…
Life is about relationships…
Life is about happiness…
Life is about God…
Life is about chocolate…
How a person answers this question, or whether or not they do, shapes who a person is. I’m not saying that you have to choose one – there is great wisdom in balancing many or all of those ideas.
Yet I can’t help but notice that I… and I suppose other young people, struggle to answer the question at all. This leads us to search, for what we don’t know, but apparently we’ll know when we find it.
At camp I try to show people that life is about relationships. In survival class we talk about how it’s almost impossible to live all by yourself. We as humans need each other. For help taking care of ourselves – getting food and building shelter, but also for company and love. Kids share how important their family and friends are to their lives.
And the staff teach how much God wants to be in relationship with us. Over and over again he reaches out and shows us how he cares. He knows us. He knows me. While it is an easy concept to say, it is much deeper. God knows when I cut a corner or tell a lie, when I go out of my way to help someone, or when I’m impatient or rude. He chooses to love me anyway and this is the amazing gift of grace. But it doesn’t stop there.
Life is about relationships. They grow and change as we grow and change. We get out of them what we put in. Many of us have seen relationships fall apart and disappear when we stop putting any effort into them. Yet God continues to try with us, with me.
Take time daily to work on your relationship with God. He teaches us to pray – to talk and listen to him. To study about him by reading the bible (remember who he is – not making him into something I want him to be). And to act on that relationship – serve and love others.
The cost of discipleship – choosing to have that relationship with God, is high. It requires commitment and time. But is one relationship I know my life can’t live without.
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