It is said that some persons wished they had never lived. This was, in normal persons, from a feeling that they had been somehow mistreated, by ill health, by grinding poverty, by perceived serious unfairness in the course of life, even by a sense of abandonment by God. We are not concerned here with persons who may object to life because of, say, depression – so in a darkness of emotion and mind, take their lives in suicide, achieved directly by their own hand, or indirectly, by debilitating habits. This discussion could be enlarged in exchanges about those we might wish had never been born, as disfavor with the birth of Hitler, or Stalin, Herod, even Alexander the Great, among many others, known or virtually unknown in history.
We do not have the full story of Job’s experience, a man who wished at a point in his life that he had never been born. We have enough to discuss the broad strokes of his life. We know he was a man of genuine faith, possessing wealth and honor in his community, having generated a family and affecting a highly respectable position. Persons actually waited on his leadership. So striking was his life that it occasioned a divine conversation we possess about his favored situation. He was to be a lesson of life for future generations, so God permitted Job’s decline, in wealth, in family, in status, and, at last, in health. The greater part of the narrative of Job’s life relates to this interim suffering to the point of disillusionment. It may not have lasted more than a year or so, but became the center point of his understanding about God. He recovered the departments of his life for a number of years, even to replace his lost family. (The story of Job is just as meaningful whether the narrative is of a true biography or a parable of life truth.)
It is, I believe, a key to life to know, understand, and draw lessons in reality from human beings, including my own person, so to perceive life meaning and apply it. I would rather achieve this search for social meaning than any other research context may teach me related to factual human life. Life is, and will remain, in the teamwork of natural (nature), and social (human life) sciences. Both are rife with mystery yet to be explored, because of the mystery of the divine. Even so all reveal vital factors for our lives.
For me, biography has been vital to my development of ideas, values, faith, and all that makes a difference to the meaning of a life in reverence for that life, in the quality about what I do and what kind of family I want to have and influence. I am much taken by the biographies of Scripture, about 400 persons from whom the reader gains at least one lesson for life. I consume biographies as my favorite recreation. The first one I remember was about George Washington Carver, the son of a slave to become a scientist and teacher of renown. The list has grown. I am now into the life of John Newton, once a slave trader, who became a magnificent minister of the Gospel, a leading light of English political and church life. Recently I read the lives of Washington, Adams, Lincoln (5th biography), Jackson, McKinley, both Roosevelt presidents and others. I have read the lives of Livingston, Moody, A. B. Simpson (2), Edwards, Eliot, and many others related to Christian ministry. My doctoral study related to the life of William Z. Foster, the American who became a firm Communist; ran three times for president of the United States, garnering more than a million votes in one election; and. became the head of the Communist Party in America until World War II, picking up again after it. I have reviewed hundreds of sketches of influential lives.
From decades of such reading I have learned that life meaning is interpreted from within the individual. Those who held faith in anything above the natural context interpreted life differently, often more bravely and seriously than those who did not extend beyond nature. Those who sensed God in their lives gained meaning, hope, gratification, decency, responsibility. This does not make the naturalist/humanist a benighted person, but it does affirm the earth-bound person misses something that would enlarge personal life and experience by using something that in the earthly sojourn makes a dramatic difference in the discovery of the unique meaning of human life. Christ makes life logical. In Christ we learn the value of a single human soul, uniqueness so great that many persons can’t believe it. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020