Why?

"Why?" is a little word - only three letters; yet it has huge implications and is often the first question we ask, out loud or inwardly, whenever something tragic, baffling, or just plain annoying happens. The answer to this question has the power to change lives, break hearts, and reunite those separated.

For me, I have found that this word helps me evaluate my priorities and readjust my standards and possibly behavior. I think it is good to ask this question regularly about our actions and especially our habits. Why do we do this? Why are we friends with this person? Why do we believe that? Why do we act in this manner? See, asking this question delves to the motive behind the outward appearance or the superficial thought. For this reason, it is also often avoided because answering this question can be painful, and it may just change you. You may not be ready for the power that "Why?" can bring to your life. Yet it is so important that we constantly make sure we are not just doing something because it was the way we were raised, it feels good, or we're just too lazy to do anything else. Those are not good reasons for any action or thought! Life is too short to waste time on less than valuable experiences, thoughts, and actions. If we settle simply for that which is easiest or most convenient, we are missing out on the worthwhile and wasting our lives. How can we tell if our actions have bad motives? By asking the "Why?" question. Of course, this question is not solely restricted to evaluating those actions that may tend to be lazy or useless - it can be used for all forms of conduct.

What brought this issue specifically to my mind is a movie I watched with my family this evening: "Cutting Edge". The story is about a young woman who has spent her whole life training as hard as possible with the best coaches and best facilities and best partners to be the greatest figure skater in the world and to win the Gold Medal in the Olympics. She has won countless medals, awards, and recognitions, but has never reached that ultimate goal - the Gold Medal. Still, she works towards it. She slaves and in the end tries potentially fatal moves in order to accomplish her goal. Now, while something can be said for her perseverance and admirable work ethic, there is definitely a point when you wonder why? Why does she do this? Why has she spent her whole life working towards one medal? Why is she almost killing herself in order to get this one thing? If this was truly her passion and her love, it might be worth it, though you still have to question the eventual sanity of the extent to which she goes. However, it wasn't her passion. At one point in the movie, her partner says to their coach, "You know, I think she doesn't even like skating!" The coach's response is to ask why the partner worked in a factory prior to skating? The partner's response is to insist that he had to. The coach's meaningful silence following this exclamation leads us to the obvious conclusion that she wasn't working this hard all these years because she loved the sport or truly had a fire to accomplish these goals - she did it because she had to. That was the answer to this "Why?" question. And if you ask me, the answer revealed a lot about the person and left a lot to be desired. Eventually, she realized that, at least in part, but maybe she would've endured less pain and stress if she had just evaluated her motives and priorities earlier.

Connected to this issue is that of one's standards and the behavior/thoughts that one finds acceptable in one's own life and in the lives of those you associate with. It is easy to let one's standards slide over time and to accept things that would before have been unacceptable to you. One problem I have observed in my own life, as well as in the lives of others, is that we tend to justify behavior by comparing it or judging it by our last actions or the last actions of those around us. If we keep this up, each action being just a little worse than the last, eventually we find ourselves far off the course with no idea as to how we got there. Instead of judging our actions by someone else's or by what we have been doing recently, we must learn to judge our actions by an objective, unchanging standard. The best standard, of course, is the Bible. This is the standard by which we must judge our actions, thoughts, and motivations. It can be frustrating and tedious to be constantly going "back to the source" (if you will), but it is what we are called to do as Christians, I believe, and is well worth it in the end.