You Do Not Get To Decide

I was scanning through Donald Miller's blog today, which usually is not as inspirational as one who is a fan of his might assume, but it is interesting and has some fun posts. I don't think he is going for anything life-changing with his blog, nor should he really, but I guess my expectations are set high with this guy. Anyways, on his blog he has a section called Confessions, Observations, and Justifications for writing about yourself (His primary mode of attack in his novels). One of his reasons reads: "I didn’t make myself, I’m not taking credit for my existence, so what’s the difference between talking about myself and talking about somebody else?" Usually I would pass over something like this without a second thought, but it struck me because it is something I think about often. The fact that I did not choose to live. Intrinsically, the fact that I am alive and have what I need to survive provided for me, that the earth works in conjunction with my needs as well as others, is a good basis for any discussion regarding the age-old questions of "where did we come from and why are we here?" Now whether you believe in creation or evolution or a combination of the two, any reasonable person can agree that they did not decide to exist - they simply do. Therefore, whether you believe life came from a creator or from substances colliding (still not sure where those substances came from to begin with), not a single person has ever or will ever give themselves life or provide themselves with existence. With that being said, to call your life your own is simply false. Moreover, it is the root of pride, narcissism, and a whole slue of destructive mindsets. You do not own yourself. Where you came from does. Yes you have the ability to make decisions, to choose a Big Mac over a QuarterPounder w/ Cheese, or what I have dubbed the "Do-Qo-Po-Cho" (Which would be a horrendous decision in my opinion, but to each their own) and of course, other, more significant, life decisions. But the fact remains that you, the truth of where you came from and why you are here, lies outside of yourself. It cannot lie solely within what has been creatED, but rather with the origins of creation. This is not relative, it applies to each person. Donald Miller touches on this in the second half of his reason for writing about himself saying that the difference between writing about yourself and writing about someone else is essentially the same - when you are writing about yourself you are writing about a human, the human condition, the basics of life; all of which are applicable to each individual. The first half of his quote is the focal point, however; "I'm not taking credit for my own existence." Who can? We got here somehow. Life exists somehow. We don't get to make that decision. I do not get to decide how these things happened. None of us get to decide.