To God be the Glory

This is definitely not a new thought to me but this is a new application to me on this thought. I read a book almost a year ago by Jonathan Edwards called "The End for Which God Created the World." In this book, Edwards seeks to prove the meaning of all existence and I think he does a great job at it. He proves through logic and scripture that all glory should go the the Supreme Being of the universe and that Being is God. If all glory is to go to Him and He created everything, then shouldn't the purpose of everything be the glorify Him and not ourselves? I would say yes, our reason for existence and life on this earth is to bring glory to the Creator. So if we are to bring Him glory with our lives, shouldn't we be doing something worth while with our lives? I would say yes, to a point and this is where my thoughts have changed.
For the past 3 years, I have been trying to figure out a way to live my life so as to bring God the most glory and to use my giftedness to the upmost for the purpose and to waste as little time as possible. In trying, I have had seasons of great growth and of stagnation but that is also a part of life, getting into and out of funks. I was thinking today though about the purpose of life. We are to purposely bring the most glory to God but that doesn't always have to be through extravagant means. Living a simple life with simple pleasures, thanking and praising God for your simple life is more glorifying to God than living a life that causes people to look more to God by your work and yet you take credit for your work and life while slightly pointing to God. We are responsible for our own reactions and lives, we should first focus on our own glorifying of God rather than the person next to us and how they are doing with glorifying God. Praise and worship of the creator is actually infectious, if you do it, people around you are going to start to ask questions and start to also bring glory to God. God is in all creation for He created it. If we point it out to people, it may dawn on them that there is a God and that He is worthy to be praised.
I would love to see a place, people, and planet that are on fire for God. A people that love Him and want to glorify Him in everything and not just the big things. God created the tiny atom that should blow itself apart as well as the entire expanse of space that we haven't even seen yet. We should seek to glorify Him in all the little things as well as the big things. This is coming from the guy that has many big things to thanks God for and yet I have trouble enjoying the tiny, "insignificant" parts of life because they are just life. The tiny parts don't bother me, I see them as life, but they are so much more than just life, they are what make us who we are and they are things that we should be thankful to experience. There is more to life than the next big thing, the next party, the next near-death experience (in some cases), there is also all the little tiny things that make this life so much more enjoyable and unique.

What lead me to think of all these things today is that I was pondering people's lives. Could it be that we are really all the same and that there are just small differences in each life that influence us in different ways but that we are all really going in the same direction, asking the same questions and just coming up with different answers and conclusions? In order to test that I would have to examine a life and that isn't actually possible because I only life for 1 life and so I can't have an experiment based upon only 1 lifetime. Psychologists can and have looked at twins and they are the SAME person and yet twins lives are very different from each other as well as everyone else. Life isn't all the same things, there are differences. There is nothing new under the sun though and from that we know that the questions that we ask are always the same, the science might change a bit but really it is the same. It's all built upon itself and we just keep on continuing to advance and I think we always will. In our advancing though, we will always be coming back to the same basic question: why are we here? what is the meaning of life? That is something that people will always try to solve on their own and until they realize that they can't solve it on their own, they can never know the answer to the question, because the questions aren't about you even if you try your best to make it about you. The questions are really about something much bigger than you. You just have to open your eyes to the world around you and see that there isn't actually something out there. Something that does want to satisfy your desire for something more. There is more to this life. There is a God