This Is the Life

My thoughts of late have been more long-run reflective than usual. As I've spent the past couple of months scrutinizing my life and faith and comparing them against my past, specifically considering what's actually been different for me in my new life, I've noticed a definite trade-off.

I won't deny that I don't live a prosperous life, and I usually feel very much alone. I'm depressed more often than not, and I often question what good end my life and suffering could possibly have. As I reflect, my life in almost no ways resembles what it once was, with regard to this world's standards of success and fulfillment. And while I was never remarkably successful by this world's standards either, I definitely used to be more so in several ways.

But even still, while I don't consider myself to be a happy person, my present circumstances aside, I have to wonder how I lived as long as I did before I had an intellectual knowledge of a purpose behind my existence. Looking back, I know I wrestled with existentialism in varying degrees for several years in my awkward, nihilistic in-between phase. My thought is that I must have survived that through a moderately hedonistic lifestyle; a thing that's instantly gratifying, but nowhere near permanent enough to permit me to take any considerable measure of satisfaction or gather any real sense of worth from it all. But somehow I usually managed to maintain just enough wisdom and foresight to refrain from making any mistakes that would be too overwhelmingly destructive to my future. I guess God was watching over me, even then.

The trade, then, was what was a generally happier lifestyle, for one that actually serves a higher purpose, for something greater than myself and this world's petty pleasures.

I am not content in my life. My hopes and dreams for it are yet unfulfilled, and some or all of them may always be so. I still go through a daily roller coaster of depression and hopeless feelings. And yet, I know those feelings to be fleeting, and I know my hopes and dreams are paltry when compared against what God has in store. Trusting in Him daily has been difficult, but not impossible, because I know that despite my present sufferings, I would not trade them for the empty, purposeless life I once lived. This darkness is only temporary, and I have to believe that God will see me through it, to a better result than I can comprehend.