Intro: The Question That Started Everything

It was about noon on a hot summer day in the Philippines.

I was fourteen years old, sitting alone in a quiet place on my father’s farm. And for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I started to cry.

Nothing bad had happened. I had friends at school whom I enjoyed being with. My life, by most ordinary measures, was fine. But something had cracked open inside me — quietly, without warning — and out of that crack came a question so large it swallowed everything around it.

What’s the point? What is the purpose of life?

I didn’t have language for it then. I just sat there on that farm, in the heat, with tears I didn’t understand, asking a question I didn’t know how to answer.

Days later, my brother Ramon handed me a Bible storybook. I started reading — and then something unexpected happened. I began comparing what I was reading with my history class. The same names. The same places. Persia. King Nebuchadnezzar. I thought to myself: This must be true. And so I kept reading.

At seventeen, I was baptized. Over the years that followed, I became a church leader, pursued spiritual disciplines, studied discipleship, and asked every serious question I knew how to ask. I wanted to know — really know — how a person grows spiritually mature. How a believer actually transforms into the image of Christ. Not just salvation. Transformation.

That question took me out of the institutional church and into house churches and organic communities in the Philippines. It took me to Japan with my wife, Lois, a longtime missionary who — to my amazement when I first met her online — was reading the same books I was and following the same thought leaders. It brought us eventually to Michigan, where we now gather with friends in homes, around tables, in living rooms. No building. No program. Just people and Jesus.

I’m still on the journey. Still learning. Still asking.

But here is what I have come to believe, after decades of pursuing God through every form and format available to me:

The question that fourteen-year-old boy was really asking — though he didn’t know it yet — was not philosophical. It was personal. It was relational. He was asking, without knowing the words: Is there Someone there? And does that Someone want me?

The answer, I have found, is yes. And yes.

The blog articles on Lifechoicely are for you if you love Jesus deeply but find yourself exhausted by religion. If you’ve sat through enough services, completed enough programs, and checked off enough spiritual boxes to know that none of it — on its own — produces the thing you’re actually hungry for.

You’re not done with God. You’re done with the version of God that religion handed you — the one who is perpetually disappointed, perpetually demanding more, perpetually just out of reach no matter how hard you try.

You’re done with performance masquerading as faith.

And somewhere underneath all of that exhaustion, disillusionment, and confusion — there is a longing. A deep, persistent, will-not-go-away longing that whispers: there must be something more to this.

There is. And that longing? That’s not a weakness. That’s not spiritual immaturity. That is the voice of God in you, calling you toward the life He always intended.

Here is the simple, radical truth these articles are built on:

God created you, out of love, to belong to His family. He is transforming you into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. And He made you to bear His image in the world — to reflect His character so fully that everyone whose life touches yours encounters something of Him. (We’ll have more of this in future articles.)

That’s it. That’s the purpose of your life.

Not to attend more. Not to perform better. Not to finally get your act together so God can use you.

To belong. To become. To bear His image.

In each article written in the coming days, we’re going to walk toward that — one honest conversation at a time. Each article is short. We’ll ask real, honest questions — reflection questions that will take us deeper and make us really think. 

Some of the thoughts that come out will feel like relief. Some will feel like disruption. A few might crack something open in you the way that hot afternoon on the farm cracked something open in me.

That’s okay. Let it crack. That’s usually where the light gets in. And hopefully it will lead us back to the heartbeat of God.

I’m glad you’re here, friend. Family. 

Welcome.

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com