I love being a human. I can experience love, peace and purpose. I can conceive of a future life in a future time and a future world. I can make choices and learn from those choices. I can believe and have hope in someone beyond my human capacity. I can have a relationship with God and He actually offers to have a relationship with me.

Not only do I love being human, I love being alive.

We are told that God created man in His own image and His own likeness. This is big - bigger than anything we can imagine. "I will be their God and they will be my people", God expresses His innermost desire toward the humans He created. He also often repeats, "and I will dwell among them".

But it didn't end with just being human. Of all the physical creation we can have a genuine relationship with our Creator now. It is supremely fulfilling when we do. God who is Eternal, (and his name YHVH carries the meaning of The Eternal One) doesn't leave our lives to be lived out as humans and then there is no more.

Jesus Christ was the one who brought the message of eternal life. In the book of John alone he speaks of it directly about 35 times. There are so many more references about living for eternity in all the gospels, so much that the young Jewish ruler asked him directly, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He clearly understood that his traditional teachers were not giving him a satisfactory picture about eternal life.

Nicodemus wanted to know the answer to the same question in John 3. Somehow, this teacher from Nazareth had the true understanding of eternal life.

If I had the opportunity to have only one conversation with Jesus, that's the question I would be asking too. When everyone was forsaking Jesus, Peter gave the reason he was staying with Jesus. "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68). Peter is saying, no one else is telling us the whole story about this greatest subject.

If I know anything about you, I would think this is the most important question in your mind. The world in which we live can influence you into thinking that what it offers in this human existence is a better alternative.

This is the downside of being human. Humans also make bad choices. Humans choose another way, another teaching, that leads to eternal death. The devil's world has its appeal and humans who don't know the true God and His Son, Jesus Christ, don't seek what they are offering! (John 17:3).

Do you have the most important thing in this life - the next life - clearly in your focus? I don't want life to end. You and I were made to want life to go on. God put that in us so we will understand that human life is only the beginning and it gets so much better than that. He promises a life that is eternal, one with peace and joy; one in which we will be with God and with our loved ones - and all without pain or sorrow. "... so shall we ever be with the Lord" (I Thess. 4:17).

Yes, I love being human. Not because humans are so wonderful. We do some pretty bad things to each other. It's a privilege to be a human, because God placed within us the capacity to reach our dreams and potential for eternal life. Anything else is a distant second. You betcha, I think about it a lot.