What if?

My wife once asked me, with gentle curiosity, why I return so often to the subject of God. It is a fair question. I do not consider myself a religious man—at least not in the formal, doctrinal sense. Much of my life has been lived in the long shadow of strict religion, and I have seen how dogma can constrict the very mystery it seeks to name. Yet the question of God—and, beneath it, the question of meaning—draws me the way gravity draws a comet toward the sun. I cannot keep from its orbit.

At the heart of that pull lies an obsession: purpose. Existence. The aching “why” that hums beneath all the smaller whys of our days. Some people can pass a lifetime content to skim the surface of that question; I seem constitutionally unable to do so. When I contemplate my place in the world, I am struck by the strange mix of insignificance and possibility that defines a human life. A single strand of hair, plucked from my head, makes no difference to the body’s survival. By analogy, perhaps the universe could hum along just as well without me. And yet—might there not be a thread, golden and necessary, woven through the tapestry of being that only I can supply? I cannot abandon the hope that my existence is more than a stray follicle of humanity.

Discipline and structure appeal to me; perhaps that is why childhood images of God—firm, orderly, authoritative—first took root. But in adulthood I have watched how religion’s fences can sometimes fence out the infinite. It is a paradox: my fascination with God is inextricable from the very institutions whose rigidity I now question. Do I ponder the divine simply because it was present in every room of my earliest memory, or because the hunger for meaning must fasten itself to some name, and “God” remains the most capacious word I know?

One question rings in my mind like a bell no wind can still: What if?

What if every one of us—myself, the four billion breathing now, the hundred billion who have breathed before—has an intrinsic reason for being? A calling stitched into the lining of the soul? A vast part of me suspects the opposite: that each of us is an ant in a million colonies, a hair on a cosmic head. But still the question presses: what if there is, after all, a higher purpose to my brief appearance on the stage? If such a purpose exists, am I not bound, by reverence if not by fear, to seek it out and live it? Would ignoring it not be a kind of quiet sin against the very fabric of my own being?

So I search. I turn the stone of existence over and over, examining every glint of light on its surface. I pray, though my prayers are often wordless. I meditate, write, converse, imagine—asking, always asking. Scripture tells us that those who ask shall receive; perhaps the asking itself is the receiving. If I discover that life possesses no predetermined meaning, then I will carve meaning from the raw material of breath and heartbeat. I will assign purpose the way an artist assigns shape to marble: not as an act of vanity but of fidelity to the creative impulse within.

I believe our souls outlive these bodies. This flesh-and-bone interlude is but a spark on an endless timeline. Still, I cannot ignore the riddle: Why this particular spark? Why this corner of space‑time, this century, this fragile body? Did God place me here? Did I, on some pre‑mortal level of consciousness, choose this incarnation? The questions fold into one another like nesting dolls, each revealing a smaller, more delicate mystery inside. I do not yet have answers, but I agree with Socrates: an unexamined life is hardly a life at all.

And so I write about God. I write not as a theologian staking claims but as a pilgrim lighting matches against the dark. I write because the very act of shaping words into questions keeps the compass of my heart pointed toward wonder. Perhaps, in the end, meaning is not a treasure buried at the terminus of our seeking but the music that rises while we seek. If so, then every honest question, every earnest “What if?”, is itself a note in the song of purpose—and that, I suspect, is reason enough to keep singing.