For some time now, a guy spray-painted from head-to-toe in silver metallic has been coming to Columbus Circle at Central Park and standing still on a silver spray-painted box for people to walk by and notice him. On each side of his box are the handwritten words, “Never Lose Courage.”

I jogged past him one afternoon last month just as the popular song, that goes, “I don’t know where my soul is, I don’t know where my home is,” came on my Walkman radio.

I don’t know whether it’s that I’m out alone more often in the city (on account of working from home) or whether I’m just tuned in more now to what goes on during the day when everyone else is at work, but I often sense people feeling lost and alone. There is a certain despair and directionlessness that is palpable at times. It has nothing to do with age and money either.

Riding the downtown E subway to a New Year’s Eve party the other week, I saw an enrollment ad for a philosophy school in Manhattan that promised answers for these three questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What am I meant to be doing?

According to the Bible, every human is born with an innate knowledge of God. Our lives are to be centered on a relationship with Him and His Son.

Just yesterday I read a column online from the Sunday New York Times Magazine in which the author, a professed atheist, expressed jealousy of her 4-year-old son for somehow exhibiting a belief in God despite any such orientation from his unbelieving parents.

“After I saw Luke praying for his father in Iraq, I asked him when he first began to believe in God,” the columnist revealed. “ 'I don't know,' he said. 'I've always known He exists.' ”

The writer then made an absolutely inane remark about how her son would surely see his heroes in heaven, including the animated Disney character Buzz Lightyear. Huh? What a way to pooh-pooh your own son’s budding faith.

A long article in the Sunday New York Times from a week ago explains how punk rock is now gearing itself more toward “therapy” for American teenagers experiencing widespread feelings of alienation and despair.

An example given of lyrics was, “I’m so lost, I’m barely there/I wish I could explain myself but words escape me/It’s too late to save me.”

A recent study online (Barna Research Group) reveals a child’s ideas about religion are set by the age of 9 and it’s very hard after that point to place faith in the message of the Bible if it hasn’t already been positively reinforced, especially by parents.

Similarly, my sister once told me that a Christian psychologist at her church informed her the general rule is a child makes up his mind about the Bible and Jesus Christ by age 14.

As a journalist in Naperville, IL during the 1990s, I once interviewed a math tutor of gifted children who informed me that children’s brains absorb the most information between the ages 2-6.

Their brain is literally like a sponge and this is the time their personalities and general concepts about life are set. They’re still picking up huge amounts of stuff through their pre-teen years and then there’s a dramatic decline. The real drop-off happens after 14 and it becomes very hard from that point on to shift neuro-associations already hard-wired in.

In an old sermon I have on tape from my pastor in Chicago, he points out that the thing Christians should be most interested in is “raising up Godly generations after you.” “No daddy who walked a crooked path didn’t find his children walking crooked paths,” my pastor says. “Kids have that wonderful instinct of putting their feet right where their daddy steps.”

Our soul is the only part of us that is eternal and whatever state it’s in upon our exit from earth, that’s what we carry with us into heaven or hell.

Sin and unbelief result in degeneration of the soul and a soul can be nearly obliterated through neglect and the darkening that occurs from being separated from God and Jesus Christ.

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God…” writes the Apostle Paul in Romans 13. “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”

In Matthew 16:26, Jesus Christ reasons, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

There is a video screen billboard for an investment firm in Times Square that reads, “This is where vision gets built.”

I think that’s a good way of summarizing what our time on earth is to be about. Unlike what we’re conditioned to think—that the game is survival and pursuing earthly goals and pleasures--it’s about equipping our soul for eternity.

Absolutely everything we do and think either works toward the soul’s growth or eats away at its light and goodness.

“All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself,” writes C.S. Lewis in his book “Mere Christianity.” “To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.”

Lewis points out that the mark each action leaves on “that tiny central self is one which no one else sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure—or enjoy—forever.”

Of course, God knows our every thought and action. He’s the keeper of our life record and it will be replayed for us on Judgment Day.

I had a friend say to me once, “We won’t know what God’s going to do with us until we die.” She said this as a way of informing me she didn’t think it was important for anyone like me to try and explain the Bible’s teachings to her or others, especially those coming from other religions.

The reality is there is only one way to strengthen our bond with God and that’s by being interested in what He’s interested in. God makes it abundantly clear in His own Book that He wants us to study it and follow it.

“The spirit of Almighty God works through that Book as you store up that doctrine in your soul,” explains my pastor in a taped sermon. “It’s not some hocus-pocus, eenie-meeney-miney-mo, E Pluribus Unum, my daddy can beat your daddy in dominoes. It’s the objective working of the Spirit of God through the Word of God and there isn’t any other way to have it in your life except to take that Book rightly divided (understanding the distinct ministry of the Apostle Paul for us today) and store it up in your soul and make that doctrine resident there and live there.”

On this subject, I recently came upon an interesting online interview of an American professor, named Mary Poplin, who worked with poor people in Calcutta through Mother Theresa’s organization there.

Poplin, who attended a Methodist church as a child, admitted rejecting Christianity as a young adult in search of other spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation and even telepathic attempts to bend spoons.

She said her departure from the faith came when she worked as an educator of poor people and people of color and was told, “Christianity was terrible for women.”

“ It never occurred to me to look around the world and see where women were the freest and note that those were countries dominated by Christianity,” Poplin said. “But I didn't think that way.”

Her journey back to Christian faith started when a fellow graduate student, who was a Christian, tried to get her to think about how she was damaging her spiritual self (i.e., her soul). She recounted that he prayed for her for eight years and then after he left the university she had a dream about him that led her to give him a phone call.

When the two met for dinner and she told him of her dream, he advised her to get a Bible and read five Psalms a day and one book of Proverbs. He also suggested she start reading the New Testament.

Once a week, the two would meet in a town between their two cities to discuss what she had read, etc. Her moment of total surrender came when she unexpectedly joined her mother on a trip back to her mother’s hometown and the two attended the little Methodist Church her mother grew up in. It was during this Sunday morning service that Poplin said she accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior.

Afterward, she said she began “to have an insatiable desire to read the Bible.”

“Romans 1 says God is obvious to everyone and people's minds who deny him become darkened,” Poplin testified in the article. “And though they think themselves wise they're actually foolish. That was me. But the Scriptures began to heal my mind so I could actually think again.”