The most important thing

Seven years ago, I was sitting at the back of a night coach heading from Manchester to London. I looked through the window and saw these words plastered on a banner at the top of a residential building:

“Make it in Life”

At first, I found it amusing. Funny that somebody felt seriously determined to advertise this message to the public. But as I began to ponder the words, my smirk gently turned into a frown. The words echoed in my head, triggering a gradual feeling of despondency.

I did a quick assessment of my own life and, as expected, I was dissatisfied — very dissatisfied. I began to shift uncomfortably in my seat. I could not unsee those words anymore. They began to feel like an urgent call, like a command to marshal every force inside my body to obey.

“Make it in Life”

In our present culture, we instinctively know what those words mean: Get rich, become famous, or do both. Though brief, those words are the raw base for many of the motivational speeches you have ever heard. They are spoken as a charge to pursue something that moves you higher up the ladder of acclaim and status.

The message is seen and heard everywhere. From the YouTube videos telling you to “follow these 7 steps to build generational wealth,” to the TikTok accounts sharing “how I quit my 9 to 5 and retired before hitting 40.” The language and presentation may be different, but the underlying idea is the same:

“Make it in Life”

The pressure is huge. You see your peers getting jobs, getting rich, getting married, getting fit, getting famous, getting things and doing things and being things that you are not. And for that, you consider taking steps to achieve what this would look like in your own life.

Thoughts of success dominate your mind. The consequent enhancement it will bring to your life fills your imagination. And the thing you dread the most, after all is said and done, is to feel like a failure.

Millions around the globe wake up each day and set out to realize this common dream. They work, like you and me, to become their own version of a person who has made it in life. We are all able to make reasonable arguments that justify our constant obsession with success. But are we able to pause and consider if there is something more to reach for?

On 7 January 1855, a 20-year-old gentleman mounted a platform and made this declaration:

“He who often thinks of God will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe.”

He went on to say:

“Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.”

If you are like me, you can not help but wonder why, at such an early stage in his adult life, a man would say something like that. What is it about God that could dwarf any other thoughts, even thoughts of astronomical riches? What did this man know about God that made other things appear smaller in comparison?

This man was Charles Spurgeon, and it is estimated that his 3,561 sermons totalled 20 million words and reached up to 10 million people in his lifetime — without the help of the Internet. These figures are apart from the books he wrote which include a seven-volume series on the Psalms, a four-part autobiography, morning and evening devotionals, and many other works covering specific topics related to God.

Seeing this, you have got to ask yourself: What is it about God that made this man so committed to his “continued investigation?”

We know that life is finite. We are born, and we are going to die. We know that things perish. We buy things, consume them, wear them, use them, and eventually give them away — even if we don’t want to. Given these realities, it is clear that nothing is permanent. If this is so, then why are we consumed by thoughts of acquiring temporary things?

If you stretch this thought further, you will begin to realize that we are not really after the things themselves. Rather, we are after what the things will mean to us. In other words, meaning is what we crave. Meaning is what we are chasing after. If I can get X, it will mean Y, and then I will be Z. We are trying to justify our existence by collecting things to make our lives mean something.

But we know, from experience, that the meaning we seek continues to elude us, even when we manage to achieve or acquire the things we thought would bring us meaning.

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

— Ecclesiastes 1:2 [ESV]

What, then, can give us meaning?

My common sense tells me it can not be something temporary. Given that our observable universe is temporary, its temporary existence must depend on something else. If that something else is also temporary, its own existence must depend on yet another thing. If we continue along this line of thought, we will progress further and further into an infinite regress. It is only logical that the existence of all things must rest on a final, unchanging, permanent thing.

That thing is the ultimate reality. That thing is the be-all and end-all of all things. That thing is the source of meaning for all things. That thing is the most important thing. That thing is actually not a thing. That thing, by nature, is a Being.

A lot of the coming essays in this publication will seek to stretch these thoughts even further. But for now, it is enough to be aware that aggrandizing yourself with material success is not the most important thing.