Start Learning What Life Is All About

In Him [speaking of Christ] was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. John 1:4-5

The French writer, Guy de Maupassant, was one of the world’s greatest writers of short stories.  At the same time, he was one of the world’s most sad and tragic figures.  As a celebrity and writer, he had it all, yet in reality, what he had didn’t satisfy.  Within a decade, he rose from obscurity to fame as his stories were published in newspapers and journals around the world.  His name became a household word.  With fame came the trappings of success:  a yacht in the Mediterranean, a large house on the Norman Coast, and his luxurious flat in Paris.  One biographer put it, “Critics praised him; men admired him; and women worshiped him.”

With all of that, surely de Maupassant could have found happiness, but like the vapor that dissipates with the sun, happiness eluded him.  At the height of a successful career, he went insane, some believe as the result of venereal disease.  On New Year’s Day, 1892, he tried to take his life by cutting his throat with a letter opener.  Taken to a private asylum on the Riviera, after 18 months of physical and mental disintegration, he died, at the ripe old age of 42.

De Maupassant’s life reminds me of a sad refrain from a popular song, the words of which reflect the emptiness of life which confronts so many.  The words go, “Is that all there is?  Is that all there is?  If that’s all there is my friend, then let’s keep dancing.  Let’s break out the booze and have a ball, If that’s all there is.”

Have you ever come to a point of desperation in your life?  Possibly it wasn’t the result of a major crisis; rather it may have been the weariness and the boredom of an existence without much meaning, and gradually a silent despair began to grip your life where the silent scream of your heart was, “Is that all there is?”

The promotion which was so meaningful to you a few years ago came your way, and now that you have it, you are weary with the added effort.  The new car and the house along with the overseas vacation are nice, but you still sit at home alone and ask, “Is that all there is?”

Keeping busy helps avoid the question, but, nonetheless, it’s still there.  The searching question, bottom line, is this:  “What is life all about, anyway?”  Is there more to life than what you see?  Is there a purpose which tells you something of why you are here and what lies beyond your last breath?

Two hundred years before de Maupassant, another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote of a God‑shaped vacuum in the heart of every person which can be filled only through a relationship with the divine.  Augustine put it like this: “Thou has made us for thyself, O God, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee!”

Do you find yourself asking, “Is that all there is?” at the end of your week when you press your head to the pillow at night and stare up into a dark and lonely hole over your life?  There is more, friend.  Missing in de Maupassant’s life was the God‑dimension which is vitally necessary to give purpose to existence and an understanding of being.

The bridge between our despair and loneliness and the reality which eludes so many is a person‑‑His name is Jesus Christ.  Of Him John wrote, “In Him [speaking of Christ] was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (John 1:4-5).

There is more, friend.  Much, much more. Don’t be shortchanged.

Resource reading: John 1:1-14

https://www.guidelines.org/devotional/start-learning-what-life-is-all-about/