125 Successful, Failed or Questionable Meaning-Making

Meaning: “conveying a significance that is not directly expressed . . .”

Meaning is embedded in everything, Gentle Reader.

Examples abound of successful, failed or questionable meaning-making:

See the final episode of ABC’s “Lost” for successful meaning-making. The whole series is an admirable exploration of the words “I was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

Go see The Karate Kid and you’ll get an entertaining depiction of life made more meaningful by Karate. That’s questionable meaning-making. Karate is fun activity when devoid of the philosophy behind it, but that discrimination must be made. Same with Yoga, or Tai Chi, or New Age meditation techniques. Actually each of these things and more must be renamed and intricately refashioned as Christian Karate, or Christian Tai Chi, or Christian Yoga or Christian meditation techniques, or Christian whatever, to qualify as successful (and safe) pursuits.

In another vein, visit any American High School and you’ll see students finding meaning in bullying other vulnerable students and justifying themselves with cries of “They’re nerds!” Wow, what impoverished thinking!

Go to an Ivy League School of Business Administration and you’ll get an earful of argument for “bottom-line thinking” devoid of ethical content—that’s failed thinking.

Go to a singles bar and you’ll find males and females sacrificing meaningful relationships for “one-night-stands” (presumably made meaningful by reason of the thrill of the moment). Failure, again.

Obviously when meaning-making makes the way in life more arbitrary, random, confusing, self-serving and ultimately, destructive and defeating, these are always negative outcomes adversarial to God’s intentions for humankind, failed attempts at meaning-making, and prime examples of negative meaning-making at its worst!

Thankfully, negative meaning and negative meaning making create avoidance behaviors in me, Fellow Truth-Seeker, and positive meaning and positive meaning-making create approach behaviors. I do not pretend to have all the answers here, Dear Reader. My concept of meaning is still emerging. In meaning, as in my relationship with God, I am a work-in-progress. But I do consider positive meanings keepers and negative meanings regularly go in the cross-shredder. Now that’s successful meaning-making!

Note well though, Gentle Reader. To God goes all credit for any success of mine. It is He who makes me successful at meaning-making. Through Scripture, He tells me to dwell on positive things (Philippians 4:8), “meaning” included, and to forget what lies behind (in the way of negative events and meaning). He tells me to press on, to reach out for the upward call (to positive meaning) in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:12-14, NKJV).

And when I do as He says, I am successful. When I do not, I am not. It's amazing!

God calls one and all to this good use of intellect, Attentive Reader. In His Word and His call, there is value, of that I am confident. And to realize that He means what He says is successful meaning-making at its best!

To be continued . . .