What Am I Made For?

That Moment You Realize That a Meaningful Life Is Inseparable from Self-Denial

“I am an involuntary witness to God’s grace, and to the fortifying power of faith.”

-Whittaker Chambers in a letter to his children

It all began the morning I started coughing up bright red blood. I only did it once or twice, but the amount of blood was not insignificant. So it left me wondering whether I should go to the hospital or something. I hate hospitals, so of course I resisted the obvious answer to that question, one which anyone else would have understood immediately. I was assisted in my temporary denial by the fact that I actually felt perfectly normal. Other than the blood coating the palm of my hand, I didn’t seem to be in any distress.

Except that I was a few hours from dying.

The bloody coughing stopped as suddenly as it started that morning. But out of an abundance of caution, my wife and I decided I should probably stop by the emergency room - you know - just to be on the safe side.

Three hours later I was trundled into an ambulance, by the ER personnel at the nearby hospital I had stopped at, and sent to a world-renowned medical center 15 miles away. The medical personnel at the original ER weren’t sure I would survive the trip. The problem was that a stent that had been inserted into my aorta three years before, in an experimental procedure, had migrated through the wall of my aorta and punctured my lung. Blood was leaking from my aorta, traveling along the stent like a kind of footbridge, where it ended by trickling into my lung. So what I was coughing up turns out to have been arterial blood from my aorta. Peachy.

The doctors told me later that, in the absence of an intervention, I was down to my last 48 hours to live. The ambulance drivers had apparently been told to avoid any potholes because the doctors believed that my situation was so precarious that any jarring might actually kill me.

Still, I really felt just fine.

When my ambulance arrived at the medical center, it was like one of those scenes in the movies. An entire team was waiting on the curb. They immediately went to work on me, adding more IV’s, shooting me with local anesthetics to insert tubes into my jugulars, and generally acting like my life was at stake.

They rushed me into ICU, wringing their hands and fussing over me. Then, after looking at numerous pictures of my vasculature, the chief of thoracic surgery came and told me what I was going to have to do if I expected to survive the week.

In all, I was going to need a complicated and improvisational surgery (18-20 hours long) that involved multiple simultaneous surgeons operating in tandem. I’ve written about more of the details before. This surgery involved a 30+ percent possibility of being cognitively altered in some way. If I survived the surgery, the recovery would be months. And there was no knowing what kind of life I would ultimately have even if I did manage to survive.

All in all, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through with it.

Now, since you’re reading this, perhaps you have surmised that I not only went through with the surgery but survived it as well. Indeed, I survived unaltered, with the possible exception of becoming even more curmudgeonly than I was before. Also, I find I am vastly more impatient with things that waste my time. And I have vowed to never spend another minute of my life wearing uncomfortable shoes. Also, once you’ve nearly died you’re allowed to say whatever you want after that. Though that last one is not universally acknowledged as a legitimate benefit of having nearly died, it is one that I vigorously defend. Other than this short(ish) list, I am pretty much as I was before. Individual results may vary.

At the time this happened, though, I had only a few hours to decide whether I was going to go through with it at all. It was 2:00 a.m. in the ICU, and it seemed stupid to sleep away what might be the final moments of my life, so my wife and I sat up talking about our years together, how much we loved each other, and the potential risks that lay ahead. She was not pressuring me to undergo the surgery. She wanted me to live, but she understood the suffering that marked my way.

As the hours ticked by that night, the complexity of the decision in front of me seemed insurmountable somehow. Any decision I made would be potentially life changing and maybe not in a good way. But there was a moment, sometime in the wee hours of the night, when a light bulb went off for me and the seeming complexity surrounding my decision suddenly drained away.

I had suddenly recalled my wedding vows.

In my vows to my wife, like many grooms I had promised never to leave her nor forsake her. Now, obviously, that only applies insofar as it is within one’s power to fulfill it. But in my own case, it dawned on me that not to at least try to live was totally at odds with the promises I had made to her. In that moment of realization, my decision became suddenly very simple and obvious: I was going to go through with the surgery.

In the 7 years that have passed since that night, those traumatic events have continued to be a source of wonder and reflection for me. Not all the time, of course, but I periodically return in my mind to that night and discover things I needed to learn from that experience.

One of those things is that vows have a simplifying effect on your life. I think that’s because, in taking a vow, you are giving up personal prerogatives and binding yourself to a course of action for which you are leaving yourself no way out. The exigencies of life no longer hold the complicating sway they once did. You are like the explorer Cortés on the beaches of the New World- you are burning your boats to the waterline and foreclosing any possibility of retreat. When a vow is taken, if you take it seriously and intend to keep it, you have relinquished some aspect of your personal autonomy in favor of something you value more.

Songwriter Billie Eilish teamed up with her brother and long-time writing partner, Finneas O’Connell, to win the 2024 “Best Song” Oscar for “What Was I Made For?”. The song also won the Grammy for “Song of the Year” in 2023. It has taken the world by storm.

The public reaction to the song is reminiscent of the widespread emotional reaction to “This Is Me”, from the movie The Greatest Showman. I wrote about that at the time. In the case of Eilish’s song, you can easily find any number of videos of the song being performed. Frequently people in the audience are quite obviously weeping as they listen to the lyrics.

Here is a very moving performance of the song by one of the current contestants trying out for American Idol.

I used to know, 
but I’m not sure now, 
what I was made for. 
What was I made for?

Clearly the song hits a nerve, but why?

It is hard not to suspect that what she and her brother have done is to explicitly articulate the central question that is haunting the hearts of many who, in some deeply instinctive way, know that they have been told a lie. Many have an abiding sense that their lives are no mere random occurrences. They are endowed with an instinct that they are made, and not only that, but they are made for something. Many people even seem to be growing exhausted by the effort required to maintain the pretenses of trendy materialist superstitions.

The thing about having been made is that you necessarily, then, have a maker. That means that none of us can ever be ultimately self-defining. The purpose of things that are made is inescapably bound up with the will of the one who made it. The one who made us is necessarily the only possible source of answers regarding what we are for. In typically modern and confused fashion, the songwriters engage with this brilliant question entirely through the lens of their feelings. Having implicitly conceded the existence of a maker, they nevertheless fail to seek any answers outside of themselves. This is, quite literally, pathetic - and not in a scornful sense. Intuiting that you are made, only to then confine yourself to yourself for answers, is a tragic path that truly warrants compassion. It is deeply sad to see someone, whose poetic intuition tells them that they are not self-originating, who nevertheless can imagine no greater vantage point for answers than themselves.

And I find myself wondering whether the tears of all those who weep at this song are tears which are reacting, not only to the central question posed by the song, but also to the heartbreak that attends the songwriters' fixation on themselves.

The problem is that, if we are made, then we are creatures. In such circumstances our very creatureliness precludes ever being able to discover, on our own, what it is that we are made for.

My own experience grappling with life-threatening circumstances in the ICU that night taught me something, and now I can't stop seeing it everywhere: a meaningful life is only found by submitting ourselves to something higher and more noble than ourselves. Choosing personal suffering in order to honor my marriage vows was the path to ultimately preserving my very life. In other words, my practical experience trying to answer questions about meaning and purpose has pulled me consistently away from making myself the center of my concerns.

The understanding of the world offered by the Christian faith has always been that Jesus is himself the maker implied by Eilish's profound question, and that he himself provides the answer Miss Eilish seeks. Jesus, the bible claims, is the creative and cohesive force who brought the cosmos into existence. It also says that he himself is the beneficiary of everything he made. One of his apostles, writing about this, said that everything there is was made by Jesus, and for Jesus.

But Jesus is also, though described as the transcendent maker, the one who emptied himself of his own prerogatives to meet the needs of others. If Christianity is true, we live in a universe in which the maker's own character is one in which both making and self-denial are intertwined. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, if such a maker crafted the fabric of our own existence in such a way that we would also be made for making and for self-denial.

Jesus wandered around before his death and resurrection saying things like the "last shall be first", and "he who loses his life will find it". Maybe he wasn't just being clever or poetically moralizing but was instead opening for us a peephole into reality itself. What if he was factually addressing the very question that seems to be haunting so many — what am I made for? What if?

What if, against everything we are being told, the very nature of the universe we inhabit is one in which meaning and fulfillment can only ever be found by unselfishly devoting ourselves to something higher than our own appetites? What if, apart from unselfish devotion to something higher, the search for meaning and purpose is actually futile? The paradox of our existence seems to be that only by renouncing our absolute autonomy can we ever discover what we are for. The meaning we find in giving ourselves to our spouses, and to our children, is perhaps a glaring clue - staring us in the face - of something central to the way our very existence has been structured.

What if this is just the way the universe is, and no amount of insisting otherwise will make it so? What if, when Frank Sinatra sang, “I Did It My Way”, he was talking utter bollocks, akin to a crazy person prattling on about the existence of glittery pink unicorns and purple cows?

I write about these things only as a witness, not as an expert. But if my own experience is any indication, it was only when I subordinated my decision to the sacred vows I had made to my wife, that all the clamoring complexity of the moment faded into confident resolve. And, say what you will, the unavoidable reality is that I really did find my life that night by losing it.

Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne…

-John the apostle of Jesus