The great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), is a person worth reading.  Consider this line:  

     "I slept and dreamt that life was joy.  I awoke and saw that life was service.  I acted and behold, service was joy."

     Tagore's observations let us see the universality of our human compulsion to help each other.  Whether we ground this in religion or not, we realize that we are deeply personal beings who feel called to engage in personal interaction with each other.
     Yet if we adhere to a strictly material view of human nature, we wonder why we do.

Here's another one:

    "Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark"

     Religion notwithstanding, faith is the grand challenge of every human being.  We are finite, we are incomplete; we cannot always see the dawn.  When I got up the other morning, I heard something I had not heard in many moons:  a bird chirping.  The sky was still dark, the morning still cold.  Yet this little bird knew that neither of these would last. It already "felt"  the light.  Every migratory bird would say the same thing:  although during the winter it may be many thousands of miles from its summer home, somehow it can "feel" the warm to come.  And it goes north.
     As faith is:  more times than not, we "feel" God more than we will ever "see" him.  Yet all evidence indicates he is nonetheless there.

One more:

     "Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky."

     When smog regularly enveloped Los Angeles, its inhabitants saw the most remarkable sunsets over the Pacific Ocean.  Now, although the sunsets are still remarkable, they're not as colorful as they once were.  We rarely enjoy the clouds in our lives, but in hindsight we recognize that they added something of value, broadly speaking, to our time here.  We appreciate their color, painfully acquired though it may be.
     And as we reach our life's sunset, we recognize that our years have not been about sun or storm, but rather about "seeing" more of the world, of seeing the clouds and the color they have brought us.  We see a bigger picture.  And, I hope, we see more of God; we see that, through it all, love and purpose, transcendent love and purpose, have been present.