What does it mean to live?  What, really, does it mean to live as a human being on this planet, in this life, in this reality?
     These are big questions, questions we cannot answer in one, two, or even five blogs.  However, I draw your attention to what I believe to be a reasonable encapsulation of an answer.  Let's look at the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.
     Perhaps you know the story of Job.  If not, I will briefly summarize it.  When the book opens, Job is one of the wealthiest people of his day--and one of the most devout, too.  From all appearances, Job seems to have it all together:  wealth, family, respect, alignment with his creator.  One day, however, for reasons that Job (and we), even to the final chapter of the book, never really learn with perfect clarity, God allows severe misfortune to come upon Job.  In a very short time, through a set of excruciating and painful circumstances, Job loses his family, his health, and a good part of his vast resources.  He emerges a broken man.
     Yet Job remains loyal to God, insisting that, whatever has happened, he will continue to believe in God, and that he will continue to see God as the greatest meaning of his existence.  So we come to chapter 28, set roughly halfway in the course of his lengthy laments, complaints, rejoinders, and meditations.  This chapter is a rumination about wisdom.
     Humanity, says Job as he opens the chapter, is born "to put an end to darkness,' to seek and search out his limits, to grapple with all the material challenges of existence, to "hew out channels from the rocks," to bring what is hidden into the light.  Humans are made to take on the world and all the adventures, opportunities, and insights it brings.  This is their work, this is their calling (verses 1-11).
     And it is this work that becomes the content of history.  History is the story of humanity striving to come to grips with and make sense of the world into which it, through no choice or fault of its own, is born.  Every era, every event, every discovery, every illumination comes out of this quest to understand and, in a larger sense, to "be" as human beings.  This is our destiny, mine, yours, everyone's:  we are here to leap into the joys and challenges of existence.  It is our richest hope, our deepest vision, a hope and vision that undergirds all others.
     However, as Job subsequently points out, despite all this laudable (and essential and inevitable) striving and achievement, there is one thing that humans will not find in the material work of this life:  wisdom or, put another way, the key to and measure of existence.  Though we conquer the world, though we may learn everything there is to be learned about space and time, though we may solve every engineering puzzle, we will never, in its fullness, find what existence means.  We will never find what is most important and true.
     Why is this?  We will not find it because, as Job states in the final verse (v. 28), "it is the reverence (the respect of, the attention on, the focus upon, the investment in) of God that is wisdom."  It is a humble faith in God that produces true wisdom and understanding.  Yes, we are born to be and take on our lives.  But we are also born, Job is saying, to recognize that, even though we may deconstruct every riddle on the planet, we will never fully understand what it all means.  We remain thoroughly and completely human, forever trapped in insuperable boundaries and unassailable limits on our grasp of what is most real and true.  We will never fully comprehend life's meaning on our own.
     This is why Job said what he did.  He knew, knew intimately and well, that, in the big picture, it is God from whom we find the meaning of history and our existence.  It is from God that we find the wisdom to fathom who we are and what we mean.   It is in God that we will understand our hope and vision as human beings.
     We are born to live.  That is our calling.  But we are also born to realize that we will never be able to live fully unless we recognize that we need God to step beyond our materials limits, the felt strictures of our finitude, to find out what everything--what we do, who we are--means.
     What does it mean to live?  It means to explore and understand everything we possibly can, yet it is also to recognize that we need God to know what anything we may do and find really and most means.