The Greatest Story

Late in the 1970s, Douglas Adams sat in London at his desk, staring out into his garden. He was pondering the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. And just like that, he arrived at the answer:

Forty-two.

It was a joke, but millions of his fans have managed to ascribe volumes of meaning to the central figure (see what I did there?) of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his radio series turned novel turned five-part trilogy turned interstellar phenomenon.

Ascribing meaning to things is what we do. We hear a song we like and, after dancing to it, singing along with it or vibing to it, we inevitably wonder . . . What does this song mean? Or if it’s a Taylor Swift song, we wonder who it’s about. We’ll ask what a movie is about or what the meaning is behind an idiom like it doesn’t hold water.

Do you want to see the human search for meaning in action? If you have sixty seconds, try this experiment: type the words What does into Google followed by the letter a, and watch the suggestions that appear, then do the same for every letter of the alphabet. What I found when I did it was a parade of questions about meaning and sometimes function: What does ASMR stand for, What does Hotel California mean, What does quotient mean, What does the liver do, etc.

We want to know meaning, we want to know significance, and we want to know purpose. Granted, not all searches happen on Google. Still, the human search for meaning is relentless, and we try to explain mysteries of all sizes. We want to know what YKK means on all our zippers (Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha), and we want to know the meaning of life. . . . I don’t have a link for that.

Sometimes we find meaning and we run with it. We turn it into an -ism. (Good luck not wondering what -ism means at this point, even though you already know—we’re in a groove now.) We humans have a way of turning someone’s idea into something so big its creator wouldn’t even recognize it.

Would Jesus Christ fit in with Christians? Would John Calvin endorse Calvinism or Martin Luther Lutheranism? The joke at Moody Bible Institute when I attended was that D. L. Moody wouldn’t be able to get hired as a teacher there because of his theological beliefs.

Setting aside the evangelical -isms, I remember the height of Lost’s popularity when I couldn’t stop posting theories and debating ideas in every forum I could find whether they were dedicated to Lost or not (even on Cubs blogs). When that show was coming to a close, everything was about Lost, even when it wasn’t. I found so much meaning in that series, its meaning became all I thought about.

So when we think about our existence—first of all, we rarely say we’re looking for the meaning of existence . . . too nebulous. We need to think about our meaning in relation to something bigger and more specific: life, God, the universe. It’s not enough to know something is, we need to know what it is, what it means, and what it does. We need to know its back story, its conflict, and we need to know where it’s all headed.

And when we ask all these questions about ourselves and the world we live in, we can’t possibly be satisfied with the answer 42 . . . or the Lost finale.

We need a story. And when it comes to life, we need it to be the greatest story ever told. Some people are satisfied with the story that God created the world, He gave humankind the chance to mess it up, and He joined them to make it better than it ever was. Others of us are just fine with the story that you live, you enjoy yourself, and then you die. Still others (who am I kidding, I mean everyone) find meaning in the infinite smaller stories we find all around us, within us, and ahead.

Every tiny thing we can find is made up of tinier things. And every big idea we discover is a small part of something else. Our story is everywhere you look. Beauty is where you find it.

The search for meaning is an undying yearning within each of us, and it’s natural and possibly universal among us all to infer from that yearning that there is a definitive answer to the ultimate search for meaning. Our love of stories implies a resolution to the questions that define us, right?

Right?

The greatest temptation humans face is to settle into the comfort of an answer that strikes us as THE ultimate answer, the pretty little bow that ties all our loose ends together. We’re on the search for peace, and some Answers allow us to feel as though we’ve found it.

But we’re human. Searching for meaning in everything around us IS. WHAT. WE. DO. What does it all mean? Yes! YES! The answer to that question is not what gives us meaning, the asking of that question is where we find our meaning. We aren’t assigned a meaning, we search for it. It’s the search that makes us human, and when we stop searching, we become something less.

Believe in God. Believe in the Universe. Believe in nothing. Trust in Jesus. Trust Allah. Trust no one. Whatever you believe, whomever you trust, peace be with you. Namaste.

But I beg of you, never stop searching. Never stop wondering. Don’t let your story come to an end. Whatever meaning you’ve found, I promise you, there is more.