You have been asking the question since before you could speak.

Why am I here? What does any of this mean? And no matter where you looked for the answer - in religion, in achievement, in relationships, in the accumulation of experience - something kept missing.

The Meaning of Life is the third book in The Awakening Series by J.P. Longenecker, a self-published author from Inverness, Florida, who has lived enough lives inside one to know that the detours were never separate from the meaning. They were the meaning.

Drawing on the First Law of Thermodynamics - energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed - this book makes a case that is as personal as it is universal. Nothing you have lived through has disappeared. It changed form. The relationships that fell apart, the years that felt wasted, the versions of yourself you had to leave behind - none of it was lost. All of it became part of what you are carrying right now.

Seventeen chapters. The question you have been asking your whole life. And the answer that has been alive inside your own experience all along.

For those still in the middle of it.