The Meaning and the Purpose of Your Life

 Life must have a meaning, and living must have a purpose.

     Why do people want to live and to survive in this world?

   Not just because their parents gave birth to them, but because many want to enjoy life and expand their enjoyment throughout their living on this earth. And that is what living life is all about—enjoyment.

     In life, there’re certain things that some people love to do, such as playing music, running, swimming, and teaching others to pursue their dreams and endeavors. Yes, wanting to do what they love, while enjoying the doing—that is the meaning and the purpose of life and living for those people.

   But, for other people, they may find themselves not having anything else they love to do other than eating, playing video games, or socializing on the Internet. Engaging in these meaningless and purposeless activities may only make them become obese, self-obsessive, and misinformed. They simply don’t have a meaning or a purpose for their life and living.

     So, everyone needs creating a meaning and a purpose in life and living by doing some of the following:

 

·  Aligning with a cause, such as helping handicapped children, or taking care of sheltered animals.

·     Joining a church or religious service to know more about faith in God.

·       Mentoring someone in need of help or support from others.

·   Spending time in nature to expand the vision in life and living.

 

The Bottom Line

 

     Find a meaning and a purpose in something in life and living. A life without any meaning or a purpose is often a reckless and dangerous life, such as doing dirt biking, car speeding, engaging in dangerous sports, and even committing crimes and violence.

     Living by faith, you know the meaning and the purpose of your life that God has destined for you.

 

Living By Faith will give you not only a life purpose destined for you, but also how to live your life with a meaning.

 

Stephen Lau

An Illustration of Living By Faith in Real Life

  

 AnIllustration of Living By Faith in Real Life

 

     A 10-year-old boy shot and killed his mother on November 21, 2022. The boy allegedly claimed that he took the gun from his mother’s bedroom down to the basement, where his mother was doing her laundry. Initially, he claimed that he was twirling the gun around his fingers when it went off and “accidentally” killed his mother.

     But, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the boy later confessed that he carried out the heinous act out of his irrational anger after his mother refused to buy him a VR headset. Members of his family further revealed the 10-year-old boy’s many previous episodes of erratic anger and rage issues, such as setting fire at home and causing explosion when his demands were rejected by his mother.

     Even while being interrogated by the FBI, the boy surprisingly asked if his VR headset had arrived or not—the one that he ordered from Amazon the day after killing his mother. Without faith, the 10-year-old boy just loved things more than people, including his own mother.

    

The Bottom Line

 

     Living by faith, you believe in God who can do anything and everything for you in your everyday life and living.

     Living by faith, you love God and people more than you love things in your life.

 

Learning

 

     In your development phase, you begin learning about things and people around you. You learn mostly from your loved ones. Your mind begins to develop with thoughts based on your own perceptions and experiences.  

     At school, you learn to read, to count, and to socialize. They all play a role in your faith in God: reading helps you read bible stories; counting enables you to count your gifts and blessings from God; and socializing makes you share your faith with others.

     Your learning should be extensive and inclusive. You may have your own preference but no rejection because you need comprehensive knowledge to understand and make sense out of the complex and complicated world. Understanding that God is in control of everything is the beginning of your faith, which gives you love.

 

The Bottom Line

 

     Living by faith, you begin your first step to reach out to God to help you with your learning throughout your life.

 

Doing

 

     In addition to learning, your life is also about doing—doing this and doing that throughout your lifespan. Your doing begins as early as in your development phase. Learning gives you the knowledge and the information, but you need to know how to apply them to your daily living through your own doing.

     With faith, you learn that success and failure are both sides of the same coin, and that you do what you need to do. With trust, you do your best. With obedience, you let God do the rest.

     Without faith, an individual may begin doing anything, whether right or wrong, just to give him or her joy and pleasure.

 

The Bottom Line

 

     Living by faith, you hear God’s divine instructions in your daily doing or undoing. You do your best and God will do the rest for you.

Stephen Lau

Living By Faith In Real Life

 LIVING BY FAITH IN REAL LIFE

Living your life in this world is the tallest order because every day you must make many choices and decisions, as well as take many actions or inactions—they all bring consequences that’re often difficult, if not impossible, to deal with. Like many, you may turn to the Internet, which only gives you more disinformation and misinformation. Worse, your thinking mind changes over the years due to your different life experiences in different phases of your life.

There’re about four phases of life changes: the development phase; the transition phase; the consolidation phase; and the awakening phase.

The Development Phase

Loving

While growing up, most probably, you’ve been living with your parents, stepparents, adoptive parents, or those close to you. In the first few years of your development phase, they all create your personality and shape your thinking mind.

If you’re blessed with having loving parents and people around you, the love of God will make you respond with your hugging, kissing, and your godly love.

Becoming a person of faith, you’ll also look at living very differently. For example, if your parents asking you to tell a “white lie”, such as saying you “love” some food that you really don’t like, you must say no because of God’s truth. Your faith will also stop you from forming the habit of lying in your life.

On the other hand, if your parents or those around you are controlling, dominating, and even abusive, your faith will help you respond positively. God says you should not only “honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12), but also “obey” them. Your obedience may not lead to their “love” and “approval” of you, but it’ll lead to the help of the Holy Spirit in changing them. Remember: God is “a father to the fatherless.” (Psalm 68:5) So, surrender your will to God, and let His Holy Spirit work in your heart throughout your life through God’s Word.

The next step to take is forgiving your loved ones for their abuse and wrongdoings and praying for them. Then, let go of any expectation of their immediate change of misbehavior; instead, accept them as who they’re with their imperfections, and cultivate your love and compassion for them no matter what.

So, continue to focus your own relationship with God to experience your own healing. Your faith in Christ gives you salvation and hope not just for yourself but also for the repentance of your loved ones. Yes, as a believer, you could be the light that leads your unsaved or wayward loved ones to their own repentance and salvation. God can do just about anything and everything in your life. With God’s love, just wait and be patient.

     Without God’s love, an unbeliever could become so obsessed and preoccupied with the thing loved that would lead to any irrational act.

Stephen Lau

Living By Faith

 

Living by Faith

 

     Living by faith is living according to the will of God. Living by faith is a tall order even for a true believer in God. The explanation is that everybody wants to do certain things his or her own way, instead of following God’s way.

     First, becoming a believer in God is usually a long and difficult journey. Why? It’s because humans are now living in a secular society where science is the dominant religion. As a result, many don’t believe in the existence of God. However, despite the absence of God in their lives, spirituality may still be present in the hearts of many. It’s because they may still believe they’ve an unfathomable spirit within them that can provide their minds with direction, guidance, inspiration, and understanding. In other words, many are still spiritual even without the presence of God in their hearts.

     So, living by faith, one must first become a believer in God. To do that, one must have the intent to believe, which begins with the thinking mind to believe the unbelievable—that is, understanding the many paradoxes of life and existence.

     Well, what’s a paradox? A paradox is a statement with two totally opposite meanings that seem contradictory to each other, and yet when they’re put together, they not only are true but also make sense.

     Believing in God has many paradoxes: the Creator becomes a human being; the Infinite becomes finite; the Eternal One enters limited time; and death is the only way to eternal life. The Presence of God is another paradox in belief: sometimes humans see God’s love, forgiveness, mercy, and justice; other times humans see only God’s indifference, His condemnation, and even His injustice. So, knowing and understanding the presence of the many paradoxes is the recognition of one’s own imperfections and incompleteness, and thus turning oneself to seeking God.

     Seeking God requires humility, which is the opposite of pride. God is above, and humans are below. Humility opens the door to God, who never changes Himself but who forever changes those coming to Him with humility. So, that’s how belief becomes becoming, which is the self-transformation. Believing in God comes with many free gifts—eternal life, hope, joy, and peace—and the free will, which is the freedom of choice to receive or not to receive those free gifts from God. The freedom of will is based on three essentials:

 

·       Faith: Believing in the existence and the presence of God is obeying His Commandments with accountability to Him.

·       Trust: Trusting God is believing in the veracity of His Word.

 

      “so is my word that goes out from my mouth:

          It will not return to me empty,

       but will accomplish what I desire

          and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

       Isaiah: 55:11

 

·       Obedience: Obedience is doing all the right and the righteous things in everyday life. This daily task is most difficult, if not impossible, while living in the flesh, already corrupted by sins. But God provides a Helper, the Holy Spirit, to guide humans along the difficult journey of obedience.

 

     The complexity of the ways of living life is that these different ways of living may overlap with one another. That is, an individual living by examples may also be living by wants while living by faith. The result is that living life is the tallest order for all.

Stephen Lau

 

NATURAL HEALTH VERSUS MEDICINE

Natural health has much to do with self-healing. The human body has a built-in mechanism that is not only capable but also responsible for self-healing and recovery from any disease or disorder. Therefore, natural health has little to do with medicine.

Medicine is a broad term that includes different medical systems that have different approaches to human health, as well as diseases and disorders.

Chinese medicine is one of the most sophisticated medical systems in the world. It has been enhanced through thousands of years of experience and research. Its unique difference from Western medicine is that it focuses on "natural health" rather than on "healing" because Chinese medicine promotes natural health and overall wellness of an individual, as opposed to the focused approach of Western medicine in treating disease symptoms.

Modern medicine is advanced in technologies and procedures in diagnosing diseases and disorders, as well as treating their symptoms. However, modern medicine may not be efficacious in removing the causes of diseases and disorders. The explanation is that they do not have a natural approach to natural health, as evidenced by the overuse of chemicals in modern medicine.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which has been around for thousands of years, has a more natural approach to health and healing. Unlike Western medicine, which focuses almost exclusively on specific organs, tissues, and body parts, Chinese medicine is holistic in that it focuses on balance and harmony of the body, the mind, and the spirit or soul. Accordingly, it does not treat just the disease symptoms, but also the underlying causes as well. To illustrate, Chinese medicine focuses on natural health, such as correct breathing to enhance and promote heart health and overall wellness.  In Western medicine, doctors will not tell you to breathe correctly unless you have respiratory problems.

As another illustration of the approach to natural health, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, sunlight nourishes the brain because it not only gives you solar energy, but also heals and purifies your brain, as well as balances your whole body system. Western doctors, on the other hand, may probably ask you to pop in a vitamin D pill if you have calcium deficiency due to lack of sunlight.

Chinese medicine emphasizes the importance of using diet to promote natural health, in particular, the use of herbs as foods, such as the use of garlic and ginger to control blood pressure and cholesterol, to heal arthritis, to overcome nausea and chest congestion. Herbs are also used in tea, such as dried chamomile flowers to heal insomnia. Furthermore, herbs in the form of sensual herbal remedies, such as aromatherapy or hydrotherapy, can be inhaled through steam, hot baths, and foot soaks to relax the mind. The use of herbs as remedies attests to the holistic approach of Chinese medicine to natural health and healing.

Stephen Lau 

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

WHY PEOPLE COMMIT SUICIDE

Committing suicide has much to do with the mind. As a matter of fact, living in this material world has much to do with the thinking mind: how it perceives and interprets life experiences 

The death of Robin Williams, the Hollywood actor, some years ago had shocked the world. Why did he kill himself? The media had been trying to figure it out what drove him to committing suicide.

Apparently, Robin Williams had everything that most people would wish for: career, fame, money, and success. He was diagnosed with depression and Parkinson's disease, but that might not have driven him to end his life so tragically. So, what was on his mind?

The brain is one of the most important organs in the human body because it controls what we do, and, more importantly, how we think. The mind is the storage place for our thoughts and memories that determine our actions and reactions in life.

People kill themselves because they are unhappy with their lives. Unhappiness has to do with mind focus. People are unhappy because they focus on what they don't have -- which in itself is negativity, creating negative energy that leads to negative thinking. In pursuing happiness, many of us focus on career, money, and relationship, and we end up being unhappy because we are focusing on what we don't have, rather than what we already have. In other words, we may want what Robin Williams already had, because we don't have them, just as Robin Williams would want something else other than those things that he already had. This is the reality of life.

But what did Robin Williams want that he did not have? It could be anything -- such as freedom from addiction and shame. Who knows?

At one time, Robin Williams did admit that he was "shameful" of his addiction and substance abuse. Shame is a more devastating and destructive emotion than guilt. The reason is that guilt may make us feel bad about ourselves but may prompt us to take remedial action, while shame makes us feel unworthy, humiliating us such that it may be recover to recover from self-inflicted low self-esteem.

But if our mind focus is on what we have, instead of on what we don't have, then we may be happier. In the case of Robin Williams, if he were to have his mind focus on what he had -- fame, money, success -- he would not have felt so shameful and worthless because of his addiction and substance abuse. Indeed, mind focus on what one has creates gratitude and thankfulness, instead of envy, remorse, and shame that are often associated with mind focus on what one doesn't have.

The tragic death of Robin Williams may shed some light on the importance of mind focus.

"Rethink" your mind to help you live a life as if everything is a miracle.

Overcome your depression with TAO wisdom.

Stephen Lau

Copyright © Stephen Lau

DEATH AND EMPTINESS

Death empties anything and everything—that is, the ego and all its attachments to the material world. Emptiness is nothingness in which everything becomes nothing.

For all human efforts, death will come in the end, and this is the way of all flesh.

An illustration

Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel A Farewell to Arms may show you one perspective of death and emptiness:

“Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but threw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.”

The hero in the story was observing how the ants were swarming back and forth on a log on top of a fire in a futile attempt at survival—just like God watching over mankind’s stubborn struggle to refuse letting go of the impermanent in the material world. Instead of acting as a messiah to help the ants, the hero simply emptied a tin cup of water so that he could have his own whiskey.

The hero’s attitude to death is also a reflection of the author’s own perspective of man’s ultimate fate: death happens no matter how hard one strives to avoid it, and anything and everything then simply become nothing.

Sadly and tragically, author Ernest Hemingway—essentially an atheist, although initially a Catholic—shot himself with a gun when he realized that anything and everything in his life were really nothing after all in spite of all his accomplishments. With his perspective of nothingness, he had lost hope of human existence, including his own. 

Another illustration

Francis of Assisi, the Italian Saint who chose a life of poverty in spite of his family’s wealth, said on his deathbed: “Death will open the door of life.”  He died gracefully, while singing.

To Francis, death or emptiness is everything. Maybe for a believer, death is, indeed, a triumph, a meaningful exodus from this mundane world to the eternal world beyond. The emptiness is just a rite of passage to everything.

Revelation

For a non-believer, life may have little meaning at all, when the end is near, because everything will become nothingness when death strikes in the end. Without God, Hemmingway viewed life as everything is nothing, despite all his fame and accomplishments, and he thus killed himself.

For a believer, the nothingness brought by death may then become everything in the life to come, and that explains why Francis of Assisi was singing on his deathbed.

So, there're only two options. If you're a believer, you could sing with joy while lying on your deathbed, just like St. Francis of Assisi. If you are an unbeliever, you would just pass away and become nothingness, just like Ernest Hemingway.

So, now that the end is near it may also be the right time to be spiritual, and to become a true believer. But how to become a believer?

Angry No More: A new book on how to control and eradicate your anger.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau