Worth Living For

When I was a kid, I sat in the back of a lot of dramatic, late-night church services.

Often the preacher or evangelist would tell a story about our fellow Christians in Russia, China, or Cuba (communist countries were seemingly interchangeable) being surrounded by soldiers in a church and forced to recant their faith or risk execution.

No matter the details, the story was always followed with a challenge: “Would you be willing to die for your faith?”

Looking back, it’s easy to see how limited this question was. What’s worth dying for? That’s hard to answer—rarely does anyone get a say in how they die and whether it’s for some kind of cause. Most of us just die whenever the time comes around, whether we’re prepared to make some kind of statement or not.

And yet, every single day, all of us get to answer a far more interesting question: What’s worth living for? If you could only pursue one thing, what would you craft a life around and do every day? And what if real sacrifice was involved … would you stick with it?

Dying for something is heroic; in the rare case that it happens, you go down in a blaze of glory, clutching to your morals or cause. Nice work if you can get it. Years later, Brad or Angelina will play you in the movie.

But living for something can be mundane—and therefore far more sacrificial, because seldom does anyone else notice. You just go on living, beating the drum for the thing you’ve chosen to value above all else. Genuinely living for something, day after day, is much more valuable than looking for the blaze of glory at the end.

So what do you think—what’s truly worth living for?

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Photo by Kaique