ANSWERS TO YOUR KID'S QUESTIONS!

CHAPTER 1
Does God Exist, and Can We Know Him?
God and Contemporary Thinking

Q 1: Does life really have any meaning? Sometimes everything seems so pointless.

This question can be so disturbing, particularly when our own kids 
ask it, that we respond by wishing it away. "You don't mean that," we
say, effectively stopping an important conversation before it starts. We
sense it will take us rapidly into areas where we are in over our head.

Parents aren't the only ones who have trouble with this question.
When President Clinton went before an MTV audience, the atmosphere
turned serious as an eighteen-year-old girl named Dahlia Schweitzer
stood up and said, "It seems to me that [singer] Kurt Cobain's recent
suicide exemplified the emptiness that many in our generation feel.
How do you propose to... teach our youth how important life is?"

What a great question. With breathtaking suddenness this teenage
girl raised one of the most profound issues of human existence.

President Clinton hedged for a moment. The New York Times 
commented, tongue in check, that the president did not seem to have
a legislative answer for this problem. I should hope not! Life's deepest
questions cannot be addressed by passing a meaning-of-life bill.

But the president did not seem to have any other kind of answer
either. His response was couched in the touchy-feely language characteristic
of our therapeutic culture. We don't really have to know life's
meaning, he suggested; we just have to learn how to feel good about ourselves.

What young people really need, the president said, is improved
self-esteem-the feeling that "they are the most important person in
the world to somebody." He told kids to avoid suicide by remembering
that, after all, "there can always be a better tomorrow," a line
apparently paraphrased from Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

But the meaning of life cannot be reduced to feeling good. After all
Kurt Cobain used drugs to feel better. Obviously it wasn't enough. In
fact, what both Cobain's death and Dahlia's question tell us is that a
therapeutic culture fails to satisfy our deepest yearnings.

So when our teenagers ask this question sincerely, they deserve our
full attention. Asking the question may be the beginning of a true religious
quest. If our teenagers have been brought up in the church-
even if they have accepted Christ as their personal Lord and Savior-
this question may still be part of their growth in spiritual understanding.

No one-man or woman, boy or girl-can live for long without a 
sense of purpose, without an understanding of life's ultimate meaning.
Let me tell you a story about the lengths (or heights) to which people
will go in order to invent a meaning for themselves when they sense 
life has none.

Larry Walters was a thirty-three year old truck driver who lived in
a small development of tract homes in Los Angeles just beyond the
L.A. airport. Every Saturday afternoon he would sit in a lawn chair in
his small, chain-link-fenced backyard, sunning himself and drinking a
six-pack.

The boredom-or purposelessness-of the situation drove Larry to
try something novel. He came up with the idea (I suspect after a
second six-pack) of attaching some balloons to his lawn chair and
floating up about one hundred feet in the air, drifting over his Neighbors'
backyards and waving at them. He went out and bought forty-five 
hot air weather balloons, had them inflated with helium, and
brought them back to his house.

Larry's neighbors came over to watch and helped him hold down
the chair as he attached the forty-five balloons. He armed himself with
a BB gun so that if he went to high, he could shoot out a few 
balloons and keep from rising more than one hundred feet above the
ground. He also equipped himself with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
and another six-pack.

Then he was ready. He shouted to his neighbors, "Let's go!"

They did, but he didn't rise one hundred feet; he went up eleven 
thousand feet! He never shot out even one of the balloons because he
was too busy clutching the chair! He was first spotted by a Continental
Airlines captain who reported that someone in a lawn chair had just
gone by his DC10. (The captain was asked to report immediately to the
tower when he landed.) For four hours (this is a true story!) Los Angeles
International Airport diverted flights coming in because Larry Walters
was hanging on to his lawn chair at eleven thousand feet.

The authorities sent up helicopters and all sorts of rescue aircraft
and eventually guided him back to the ground. When Larry landed at
dusk (I remember seeing all this on television), it was an extraordinary
scene. There were sirens, police cars with their bubble lights spinning,
and hordes of camera crews converging on this man as he landed in
his lawn chair.

They shoved a microphone in his face and asked, "Were you scared?"
His eyes were as big as saucers. "Yep."
"Are you going to do it again?"
"Nope."
"Why did you do it in the first place?"
Larry Walters replied, "You can't just sit there."

Something within us tells us there has to be more to life than mindless
relaxation. Something within us drives us to find life's meaning-
or to go to extraordinary lengths to create our own.

You can't just sit there.

Human beings cannot live without a sense of purpose. Scripture
teaches that we were made to know God and to return God's love-
that's the sum and substance of every person's reason for living. Made
in God's image (Gen. 1:26,27), we sense this truth about ourselves
even when we cannot explain it clearly. Our built-in sense of purpose
is so strong that when people turn away from God, they will turn to
something else in order to make sense out of their lives, to define
some purpose for their existence. (Rom. 1:18-22).

The earliest chapters of Genesis set forth this purpose and extend its
meaning into our work and daily activities. We are to cultivate the
earth, to name the animals (as we do even today in discovering new 
species), to exercise dominion, becoming co-creators (or partners) with
God in caring for the earth's resources. Our work actually furthers God's
great creative purpose. When we do our work well, it reflects God's
glory and gives him praises. God's purpose can sustain us in triumph or
tragedy, in despair and disappointment, and in moments of great joy.
Our life and work indeed have purpose; to bring glory to God.

So when your teenager asks, "Does life really have a meaning?"
answer, "Yes! To know God and return his love!" (or, in the words of
the Westminster Shorter Catechism, to "glorify God and enjoy him
forever"). And then go on to discuss how this gives purpose to the
young person's life in the present.

You made us for yourself, and our hearts find
no peace until they rest in you.
Saint Augustine, Confessions

For example: Has he or she just broken up with a girlfriend or 
boyfriend? (Such an event often provokes this question.) Talk together
about how relationships aid or hinder our relationships with God.
What purpose do they have in the larger scheme of things? For relationships-
like everything else-can assume their appropriate meanings 
once we understand our ultimate reason for living. If we don't
understand humankind's ultimate purpose, the meaning of our lesser
purposes will always become distorted and assume either too much or
too little significance.

Added 4/16/01