As I strolled through a nature preserve near my home a few weeks ago, I thought of a song, a song done by Neil Young in the late Seventies.  It is called "Holiday."  In this song, Mr. Young sings of how city dwellers, looking to refresh themselves, spend a day in the country, trying earnestly, as he sees it, to enjoy its pleasures, its wonders, its slower way of living and looking at things.  But he also notes that try as they might to imbibe and ingest this ambience, these city dwellers in the end must return to the city and the frenetic lives they lead in it.  He closes the song by talking about how before we know it, "lives become careers" and, he adds, children cry in fear, "let us out of here!"
     Although we could read this song a number of ways, it certainly seems to be a testament to the angst that many people feel when they look at their lives.  We are born, we grow up, we go to college, we find jobs, we get married, we raise children, we become empty nesters, and then, when we have done everything we think we can (or, unfortunately, sometimes before we think we have), we die.  Small wonder that people cry out, "Let us out of here!"  We wonder why we ever lived.  What, really, was our life about?
     Absolutely nothing, unless, as the writer T. C. Boyle pointed out recently, God exists.  Without God, as he sees it (and he is absolutely correct), there is no other purpose than to live.  But how can we insist that living is in itself purpose if we deny, in the absence of God, that purpose even exists?
     No wonder that so many of us are crying, "let us out of here!"
     Unless there is a God, we will never know where we are really going.