We Want to Matter

BRIDGET  HOM

Across every culture, generation, and civilization, human beings have shared a common thread of desires that go far beyond survival. We do not simply want food, shelter, and safety. We search for meaning. We long to love and be loved. We wrestle with questions of purpose, identity, morality, eternity, and what lies beyond ourselves. This common thread throughout humanity suggests we are designed for more than mere existence and were created for something more.

One of the strongest examples is the human desire to worship something—to dedicate our energy, efforts, and minds to something. Throughout history, people from vastly different cultures have looked beyond themselves toward something greater. Even when their beliefs have differed, the instinct to seek transcendence has remained. Why would human beings everywhere possess this longing if there were nothing beyond the material world to satisfy it? Hunger points to food. Thirst points to water. Our longing for meaning and transcendence may similarly point to a reality greater than ourselves.

The human need for purpose offers another clue. We are rarely content to simply exist. We want our lives to matter. We want to contribute, create, protect, build, serve, and leave something behind. If human beings were only the accidental result of biological processes, this persistent search for meaning is difficult to explain. Yet nearly every person eventually asks some version of the same questions: Why am I here? What am I meant to do? Does my life matter?

Love may be the most compelling evidence of all. From a purely self-preserving perspective, love can be remarkably illogical. People sacrifice comfort, money, opportunity, and even their lives for someone else. Parents would die for their children. Strangers risk themselves to save people they have never met. We forgive when revenge might seem easier. We grieve because another person has become deeply valuable to us. Love repeatedly causes human beings to act beyond simple self-interest and the concept in and of itself cannot be conjured up based on history or science, but all human beings want it.

That suggests there is something within us that cannot be fully explained by survival alone. We seem to recognize that people possess value beyond usefulness and that love, truth, beauty, goodness, and justice are real things worth pursuing even when they cost us something.

No single human longing mathematically proves God. But when these universal patterns are considered together—the desire to worship, the search for purpose, the longing for unconditional love, our sense of moral meaning, and our attraction to something greater than ourselves—they form a compelling argument.

Perhaps humanity continually reaches beyond itself because there truly is something beyond itself to reach for. Our deepest desires may not be evidence of an emptiness in the universe, but evidence that we were made to encounter the source capable of fulfilling them. That source is what we call God.