It’s the question almost everyone asks at some point. Sometimes it arrives in the small hours of a sleepless night. Sometimes after a bereavement, or a redundancy, or the quiet realisation that the life you’ve been building doesn’t quite fit any more. Why am I here? What’s it all for? I have these conversations more often than you might expect. People raise the question carefully, almost apologetically, as if asking it out loud might make them sound foolish. It doesn’t. It’s one of the most important questions a human being can ask.
To begin to answer it, I think we have to reimagine how we see our own existence in the first place.
There’s a line that’s stayed with me for a long time, often attributed to the French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: we are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. The attribution is debated, but the idea is striking enough that it endures.
Read it slowly. The order matters. Most of us, most of the time, assume the opposite. We treat our physical, material existence as the real thing, and any spiritual dimension as a sort of optional add-on. Teilhard de Chardin’s framing flips that completely. The spiritual is the foundation. The human, in this short window of time, is the experience.
If that’s true, it changes everything.
The Christian backbone of the idea
The Bible has been making this point for thousands of years, in different language. Genesis describes humans as being created in God’s image. Jesus himself draws the same distinction.
“The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.” (John 6:63)
That isn’t a dismissal of physical life. It’s a clarification of which dimension is foundational. Our spiritual selves are our deepest identity. The years we spend in our physical bodies, doing physical things, are real but temporary. A spiritual adventure in human form.
This isn’t fashionable to say in a culture that increasingly behaves as though only the material is real. But the older view, that we are spiritual beings first, has profound implications for how we live.
Four shifts in how we see ourselves
If you take this idea seriously, four shifts tend to follow.
- Prioritising the spiritual. Jesus told his followers to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). The order of priorities matters. Most of us spend our energy on what’s urgent and visible while quietly neglecting what’s actually most important.
- Reframing challenges. Paul, writing to the Romans, describes how suffering can produce perseverance, character, and hope (Romans 5:3-5). This isn’t romanticising pain. It’s recognising that hard seasons, when handled well, are where some of our deepest spiritual growth actually happens.
- Interconnectedness. Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27) is a reminder that none of us is doing this in isolation. Our journeys are bound up with each other in ways most of us underestimate.
- Purpose-driven living. The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it as well as anyone has: our chief purpose is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. A short, profound sentence that, if taken seriously, will quietly reorient most of the decisions in your life.
Five practical practices
These shifts in perspective are powerful, but only if they show up in actual habits. Five things, drawn directly from how Jesus himself lived, that help.
- Daily prayer and meditation. Jesus “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). If the most spiritually centred person in history needed regular, dedicated time alone with God, the rest of us almost certainly do too. Build it in.
- Mindful living. Jesus was striking in how present he was to the people in front of him. Whatever the situation, he wasn’t half-distracted by the next thing. Practising real presence is one of the simplest forms of spiritual awareness.
- Compassionate action. Jesus modelled service over status (Mark 10:45). The spiritual life isn’t only inward. It’s expressed in how we treat the people around us, especially those who can’t help us in return.
- Continuous learning. Even as a child, Jesus was found in the temple, learning and asking questions (Luke 2:46-47). Wisdom comes through ongoing engagement with scripture, with wise voices, with honest reflection on our own lives.
- Time in nature. Jesus’s teaching is full of nature. Sheep, vines, mustard seeds, birds, fields, water. Time in God’s creation has a way of recalibrating us in ways that no amount of indoor activity can match.
What this perspective actually changes
Living as a spiritual being having a human experience isn’t an abstract theological idea. It produces real, tangible differences in everyday life.
- Less fear. Jesus’s repeated message was “do not be afraid” (Matthew 10:31 and many others). When you know your deepest identity is anchored in something larger than your circumstances, the daily anxieties have less power to define you.
- More resilience. The resurrection is the ultimate statement that physical setbacks aren’t the final word. People who carry this into their lives develop a kind of resilience that doesn’t break under pressure the way it might otherwise.
- Better relationships. Jesus’s command to love one another (John 13:34) reshapes how we treat other people. Spiritual identity changes how you see the person across the table.
- Greater purpose. Aligning your life with something bigger than yourself produces a sense of direction that career success alone can’t replicate.
- A more whole kind of life. Jesus said he came that we might have life “and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Not just survival. Not just ticking through the days. A life that’s actually alive across every dimension, spiritual, mental, physical, relational.
The everyday becomes the sacred
Living from this perspective doesn’t mean ignoring your human life. It means seeing it differently. Every joy, every struggle, every ordinary day becomes part of a longer spiritual story rather than something disconnected from it. The mundane gets quietly elevated. You start to see the sacred in the cup of coffee, in the difficult conversation, in the school run, in the slow afternoon.
That’s exactly what Jesus did. He used the simplest, most ordinary things to convey the deepest truths. Vineyards. Lost coins. Bread. A father waiting for a son to come home. The whole of life is the territory.
If you’ve never really explored the life of Jesus for yourself, I’d genuinely encourage you to. Not as a religious obligation, but as a serious examination of what the most influential life in human history actually looked like, and what it might still mean for yours.
An invitation rather than a conclusion
So, the question I started with. Why am I here, and what’s it all about?
I don’t pretend to have a tidy answer that fits in a blog post. But I’d offer this. You’re not an accident. The spiritual dimension of your life is more real, and more important, than most of our culture tells you it is. And the life you’re currently living is part of a much longer story than you can see from where you’re standing.
How that lands depends on what you do with it. The question isn’t really one you answer once and then file away. It’s one you answer continuously, by how you actually live.
So if you genuinely lived for a week as a spiritual being having a human experience, rather than the other way round, what would change about how you spent your time, treated the people around you, and approached the things that scare you?