Our needs as people are really quite simple. Beyond air, water, food and warmth, our only real primal need is to find validation for our existence...or significance. In fact, if a person feels their purpose is valid, they will give up their life for a cause. All our activities are then to gain significance, protect what significance we have, or to hide from others and ourselves our lack of significance.

No person has ever died from a lack of sex...in fact when a person has a higher purpose in their life, they live willingly celibate. Money, power, prestige are all expressions of apparent significance. To be in a loving relationship we gain in our significance to others and they to us. A more mature person comes to realize that our attempts to gain signific- ance from others is futile as we can only be as significant as we are to ourselves...the rest is illusion.

Yet if we do not have any existence beyond our short mortal life, what then validates our being? To be truly significant we need to surrender our significance to a greater calling, a greater being! Christianity teaches us that we do not have the significance within us to approach that being. Rather, God grants us that significance through His grace.

-- Dr. Wayne Coghlan