What is the Meaning of Life?

In the peace and quiet of the early morning, the air-raid siren woke us from deep sleep. After three years of war, this interruption had become routine. Before we went to bed, we received warnings of an impending attack. Our bathroom bomb shelter was laid out and ready.

The incoming missile warning came a few hours later. “Eleven cruise missiles are flying toward Lviv,” our home. Four miles away, a middle-aged man and his wife gathered their three children. They lived in an old apartment block that had no basement. They sheltered under the concrete stairwell in the hall. Drones preceded the missiles, intended to weaken our air defense capabilities.

“Daddy, I’m thirsty,” said his young daughter. As any father would, he walked quickly to their apartment to grab a bottle of water. Four miles away, my wife and I tried to sleep on the thin cotton mattress that covered the floor in our bathroom. But the sounds of drones, anti-aircraft fire, and explosions made that difficult.

As soon as you hear the faint sound of approaching missiles, they are already passing over your home, all eleven of them. That was followed by more explosions. You can tell the difference between a missile interception and a strike. The shockwave of the latter, if close enough, shakes the building, and you feel the pressure in your bones.

The explosions that followed destroyed three different residential buildings. One, where a mother and her three children sat cowering under a concrete stairwell. Just as this loving husband and father was about to return with a bottle of water. His family was gone. He received minor injuries. Two days later, my wife and I bought flowers to place at the monument in front of the burned-out ruins. Most survived; six people, including children, did not.

How do we process this? Some survive; others do not?

The Wrong Question

It’s common to hear survivors say, “God saved us.” Or, “God blessed us in helping us survive.”

For those who survived, and those who did not, did God choose one family to save and another family to leave in the path of destruction? Did one couple pray more faithfully? Believe more strongly? Deserve more? Was one family’s survival a miracle while another family’s death was somehow part of God’s plan?

These are not abstract theological questions. The explanations we seek out, and long for, rise through tears of anguish, suffering, and deep personal loss. “Why? How can there be meaning or purpose in any of this?”

One answer commonly offered to ease the pain is: “God’s ways are not our ways,” from Isaiah. Is this an answer that makes death feel reasonable, turning survival into proof of greater faith? Does this imply that loss means God looked out for some more than others? Or that loss is somehow part of a grand plan?

Faith is not the belief that we will be spared. Faith is the trust that we are never alone.

I do not believe a spared life proves divine favor, and I do not believe a shattered life proves divine disfavor. War does not reveal who is worthy of God’s care. It reveals how fragile life is, how little control we truly have, and how deeply we need a faith that can survive without easy answers.

The meaning of life cannot be a guarantee that tragedy will not come. It cannot depend on explaining why one person lives and another dies. If meaning depends on certainty, security, or control, then meaning will collapse whenever life becomes unbearable.

And life does become unbearable.

I’ve come to believe we often ask the wrong question and look in the wrong place for the answer.

When Explanations Fail

A three-year-old should not know how to recognize an air-raid siren. Yet one day, as the warning blared, my grandson stopped playing with his toy and looked at me with wide eyes.

“Grandpa, are the rockets coming?”

I checked the threat app on my phone. No immediate danger, so I told him we would be okay. But his question stayed with me. It carried the weight of a nation’s trauma.

He was already learning that the world can be dangerous and that safety is not guaranteed. But I also thought about what he might learn over time: even when his world trembles, fear and suffering invite love and compassion in response.

There is no spiritual shortcut around the grief of a father who has lost his family. No clean answer explaining why one couple survives when another family does not. Some questions must be held with reverence rather than solved with well-meaning, but difficult-to-understand religious certainty.

The Meaning of Life We Look For

Many of us learned to believe that meaning comes from having the right answers, making the right choices, finding the right church, achieving enough success, or guaranteeing a future home in heaven. We may have been taught that faith gives us a dependable system for knowing what will happen and why.

But war, loss, illness, betrayal, spiritual disillusionment, and grief have a way of exposing whether those systems can carry the weight of real life.

For years, our church in Lviv was known for its coffee shop. It was one of the first church coffee shops in the city. Young people loved it, and our numbers doubled. At a Christian conference, the emcee introduced us with enthusiasm:

“Welcome, New Horizons — they have the best coffee in town!”

Our people cheered. But in that moment, something inside me became unsettled.

“Coffee isn’t what we should be known for.”

We had built something visible, successful, and attractive. But I began to see that, despite teaching Scripture, training leaders, and building a vibrant community, we had often emphasized information more than transformation.

“It was like handing people beautifully written maps without ever teaching them how to walk the terrain.”

That is part of the crisis of meaning. We may have maps to navigate our beliefs, doctrines, goals, and religious language to explain life, yet still not know how to walk through grief, fear, uncertainty, or conflict with commitment and love. When life’s storms raged, my foundation and the church collapsed. Suffering revealed how blind a guide I was.

The meaning of life isn’t just knowing the map. It must include becoming the kind of person who walks the terrain with the confidence and humility of knowing it well, as Jesus did. Then reaches out to help others walk it too. Meaning is the risen Christ inviting Thomas to touch his wounds. Knowledge fades, but experience is meaning given flesh and new life.

The Meaning of Life Is Not Selective Rescue

When people survive a disaster, it is often natural to call it a miracle. Gratitude is appropriate. Life is precious. Survival is a gift. I get that, and faith is essential and comforting.

But we must be careful with the stories we tell afterward.

If we say, “God saved us,” what does that imply about the family who did not survive? If we say, “God protected our home,” what do we say about the home next door that was destroyed? If survival is proof of God’s care, does loss become proof of God’s absence?

I cannot accept that any longer.

God’s love is not measured by who escapes a missile, who receives a diagnosis, who keeps their job, who avoids suffering, or whose prayer appears to be answered in the way they hoped. We do not honor survivors by turning their survival into evidence that they mattered more. And we do not honor the dead by suggesting their loss was a divine decision. Or that we can explain and defend as somehow being part of God’s will.

The question is not whether God loves the spared couple. God does. The question is whether God also loves the young father standing in the ruins of the life he knew. The answer must be yes.

God is not the guardian of my certainty. God is the companion on my journey.

Companionship is not simply a contemplative mystery. Trust is not blind. It is built into the story of a God who has walked into the worst suffering. And not from a distance, but who was nailed to it.

To admit we do not have a certainty-based answer is not a smaller faith. It is a faith that refuses to make God into the author of our explanations or the manager of our outcomes. Perhaps that is what Isaiah meant — “God’s ways are not our ways.” This invocation invites us to recognize when old answers and well-worn interpretations that once provided comfort need re-examination. Mystery remains mystery, but pregnant with new life, waiting to be welcomed and birthed into something even greater.

Abiding in Christ is a trust that learns to look for God not only in rescue, but also in grief, in the people who stay, in the hands that serve, in the meal prepared for strangers, in the courage to keep loving, and in the presence that does not abandon us when the world falls apart.

Meaning is Love Made Present

The meaning of life is not found in mastering life. It is found in learning to live awake, present enough to keep tending to what loss and suffering leave behind, again and again.

To live awake is to recognize that God’s presence is not something we achieve through better doctrine, stronger discipline, perfect behavior, or spiritual performance. It is something we receive. Something we awaken to.

It is found in the present moment. The only place where love can be chosen, trust can be practiced, and compassion can take shape.

This does not mean ignoring the past or avoiding the future. The past matters. The future matters. Planning matters. Healing matters. But love cannot be lived yesterday or tomorrow. It can only be lived now.

The person in front of you. The grief you are carrying. The fear rising in your chest. The need you can meet. The truth you can speak. The mercy you can offer. The breath you can take before reacting.

These are not small things. They are where meaning becomes real and lived.

A Life of Presence

The meaning of life is not a formula to possess. It is being present in the moment, welcoming all we experience. Respond appropriately with humble and loving action, then let go to remain open and present.

It is learning to receive God’s presence in the middle of an unfinished life. It is allowing fear to soften into trust. It is learning to see others not as problems, categories, threats, projects, or enemies, but as people created in God’s image.

It is choosing compassion when control feels safer. It is remaining present when running away would be easier. It is practicing truthfulness when performance would protect our image. It is allowing grief to make us more human, not less.

My faith once gave me answers. Now it offers me presence and trust. It once demanded certainty. Now it invites me into mystery.

That movement is not a rejection of God. It is often the beginning of a deeper encounter with God.

Begin Where You Are

You do not need to solve the meaning of life before you begin to live meaningfully.

Begin by noticing.

• Where am I trying to control what I cannot control?
• What fear is shaping my decisions today?
• Where have I confused certainty with trust?
• Who is in front of me right now, needing love, attention, or compassion?
• What would it mean to become present to God in this moment?
• What is one faithful action I can take today?

Practicing God’s presence is not passive resignation. It is active attention. It is the soil where love grows, and compassion becomes action.

A Fellow Traveler

I do not consider myself an authority on the meaning of life. I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes, and I walk this path more through lived experience than as a scholar of theology or philosophy.

What I have learned is this: subtraction, not addition, is often the invitation. The real question is not simply what I have added that I thought was vital to knowing God, but what I have added that may actually stand in the way.

I write to share the journey of abiding in Christ and practicing God’s presence. This is a journey, not a destination. I do not always walk it well, and neither will you. That is part of the gift: we walk it together.

A Companion for the Journey

If you are asking what the meaning of life is because life has become painful, uncertain, or unfamiliar, you are not alone.

Perhaps the faith that once carried you no longer offers the assurance it once did. Perhaps you are grieving a loss, facing change you did not choose, or wondering whether the stories you inherited can still hold the weight of your lived experience.

Practicing God’s Presence is not a system to defend or a doctrine to master. It is a companion for people learning to live with greater trust, awareness, compassion, and love in uncertain times.

The Presence that transforms us is not something we achieve. It is something we awaken to.

Practicing God’s Presence