Tim Wildmon
AFA president
March 2005 – One of my hobbies is perusing book stores. About once a month my lovely and talented wife Alison and I will go in Books-A-Million, have a cup of coffee, and I’ll look around while she does the family bookkeeping. Those bank statements come every month, don’t they? And the bills come due every four weeks as well. But as the Bible says, “If a man can find a good woman who will also do the family bookkeeping with accuracy and efficiency, he has indeed been blessed from God.” It’s in the book of Benjamin, I believe. But I like to see what the best sellers are and for many, many months a book titled The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren has been in the top two or three books in America. Warren is an evangelical pastor from Southern California. The reason for the popularity of this particular book, I believe, is because it is a basic human desire to want to know the answer to the questions, “Why am I here?” and “Why does my life matter?”
Getting deep on you already here, and we have just moved into the second paragraph. Now let’s move to the third.
These are truly questions for the ages. (And I intend to answer them in 800 words.) Everyone wants to believe that there is substance and meaning to his or her life. My thoughts on this subject have basically come down to one word: relationships. Without relationships there is not really much to live for. See Tom Hanks in Castaway. His will to survive was directly related to his desire to again have a relationship with the woman he loved. Ironically, to keep his sanity, he even developed a “relationship” with a volleyball named Wilson.
This is why parents naturally love their children so deeply. They crave the relationship. To love and be loved by your children brings joy to the human heart unlike anything else we can experience on this earth. Understanding this love, helps us understand the love of God.
The other day I was watching another Tom in a television version of the movie Jerry McGwire. It was a cleaned up version, I’m sure, so I cannot recommend it for family viewing, but there was a scene in the movie that struck me. Jerry McGwire is a money-driven, power hungry professional sports agent. After falling from his lofty perch as a top agent for a high-profile firm, McGwire finds himself with only one client – an aging football star played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. After Gooding’s character has the game of his life and leads his team to victory, McGwire hands his cell phone to him so he can call his wife in celebration. Seeing his friend’s happiness in sharing the moment with his wife over the phone, McGwire begins to realize that he has no one to share the joy with. At a time when he should be the most content because his client had guaranteed both of them a lot of money with this one performance, McGwire was empty. Why? Because he had just broken off his relationship with his wife. He was more interested in his business than his marriage relationship.
Although I have not studied every religion and philosophy in the world, I have studied a lot of them and I have come to the conclusion that it is the Christian worldview that makes the most sense in answering the questions I posed earlier. There is logic and reason to what Christianity teaches about the earthly plight of mankind collectively and the person individually. And Christianity is all about relationships. With God and with our fellow man.
The very first book of the Holy Bible is Genesis. And the very first verse in the very first book reads this way, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” A lot of questions about our existence here on this planet can be answered by answering the question: Do I believe that verse? If you believe that verse, then you believe that God exists. The rest of the Bible’s story is about God’s relationship with people.
Now I don’t understand it all, but one thing is clear, and that is that God cares about people. The Scripture teaches that God sent Jesus Christ to earth to be the bridge between the sinfulness of people and the holiness of God. It also teaches that Jesus desires a personal relationship with each of us. In other words, God cares about us. We matter to Him. Jesus said so. You can read it for yourself. It is, after all – for you bookstore junkies like me –the best seller of all time. Only I wouldn’t start in the book of Benjamin. It’s very hard to read. 
