This post is a part of 20SB’s Blog Carnival: Can’t Live Without, and Alice.com is awarding prizes to lucky bloggers and readers!
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What can’t I live without? That’s a question for some deep thinking.
The first answer for many would probably be necessities like oxygen, water, and food. But what if you went even further and said I can’t live without my liver functioning… or the way that my cells are undergoing mitosis. There’s so many intricate ways in which we are staying alive and we could go on and on about how it all works together and how if one part malfunctions, it could be deadly.
Or, you could agree with Maslow and say that the answer fits into a nice pyramid, called the hierarchy of needs.
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm
If you would’ve asked me that question before my Dad got sick, I would’ve said I can’t live without my parents. Fast forward to now: my Dad has been gone from Earth for 3 months. I am still breathing. Still living, yes, but not the same as before. Some days it is harder to breathe than others.
I would’ve also said I can’t live without my boyfriend Ryan. But when we broke up last fall and didn’t make contact for two months, my heart still continued to beat. Sometimes it really hurt to beat without him, but I did survive nonetheless.
Based on just those two experiences, I’m living proof that I could live without a loved one. But is it really living just because you are walking and breathing? I suppose this all depends on your definition of living because I’ll be honest and tell you that some days I don’t really feel alive. It’s not ideal to live without someone you love and certainly something I wish didn’t have to happen.
Or I can look back and see what I didn’t have at one point or another and wonder, “How did I live without that?”
Like high-speed internet. And digital cameras, cell phones, a driving license, my body pillow. My boyfriend Ryan. I would guarantee he would say he couldn’t live without a Mac or maybe the infamous iPhone. Because honestly, I think there’s an app for living now. Only kidding Ryan dear, I love you and your iPhone. :)
I can also bet that someday when I have a family of procreation, I will have so much love for them and thus wonder how I ever lived without them.
And I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that every generation looks back at another and wonders how they lived without certain items that we now take for granted. I’ll admit that I can’t imagine living without running water, among many other things.
Humans are just funny like that. We are so much more adaptable and capable than we think. We’re amazing creatures! But we are oh so good at taking things for granted. And perhaps throwing words around with little thought such as, “I can’t live without that.”
I can almost guarantee that we can live without so much more than we think possible. I could go and on and on about what I think we couldn’t live without because we don’t know life without it. But don’t you think someone has done it before?
Most notably for me though, I used to live without a relationship with God. Before my junior year of high school, He wasn’t invited into my life. Kind of strange, since He’s the one who created it. Sure I was living, but not living the way it’s truly meant to be. Life to the full. In hindsight, it is almost impossible to imagine living without Him, but He does allow us to do so. However, if that is our choice, I must be blunt and say we cannot live with Him eternally.
With all this being said, what is it that I must have to live?
I cannot live without Him because in my eyes, there’s no other way. I can’t live without His love, grace, mercy, compassion, goodness, beauty, and the millions of other blessings of God. When everything else that I think I can’t live without is gone, He is still there. God gave me this life and He provides what I need to live it. It’s under His control that I’m even alive.
Above all else, I need Him.
How about you?
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