Discovering Your Life Purpose
The town cryer rings his bell up and down the street, announcing the arrival of the famous traveling monk, Hyperboles. Hyperboles will be speaking at the castle tonight about ‘Discovering Your Life Purpose.’ Throughout the week, he will also be hosting workshops in which, for the modest sum of fourteen shekels, you too can discover and write out your life purpose statement (assuming you know how to write).
It could have happened this way, but I doubt it. Finding one’s individual life purpose seems to be a modern obsession. Social media accounts, bookstores, and conference centers are saturated with self-anointed experts who sell secret formulas to help you find and fulfill your purpose. It’s no longer a cottage industry – life purpose is big business.
We all want to know why we’re here. We want to know we’re using our time well and having an impact on those around us. It’s tempting to seek the comfort of an articulated purpose statement against which we can measure our success, but there’s one major problem. I don’t think any of us are called to discover or fulfill our life purpose, nor do I think we are capable of doing so.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so we would walk in them.”
God has already planned the work He has for me to do and He will do what He wants in and through me. I am not my own; I have been bought with a price.* I do not get to make my life into what I want it to be – God is making my life into what He wants it to be.
He is at work weaving an enormous tapestry through human history. I want to determine my place in it and I want it to be big and beautiful. But I don’t get to make that call. I am just one strand in this tapestry, and I may never see how I fit into the greater whole. I may not like where God puts me, and I certainly won’t like how small I am. I’m not even promised the dots will connect and it will all make sense when I look back. The promise is God will use me how He wants. This is where my significance is found – not in my ability to determine my place in the tapestry, but in the intentionality with which God determines my place. He knows my purpose and will fulfill it in spite of my ignorance and incompetence.
Man plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps.** Discovering and fulfilling my life purpose is a burden I was never meant to carry. I don’t know what the future holds (or if there is a future for me at all), and I can not create it. I have not been called to be faithful with my whole life or turn it into something spectacular. I have just been called to be faithful with this moment. Then the next moment and the moment after that for the rest of my life. It is as I do the next right thing one day at a time, that God builds my life into what He wants it to be.
J.
*1 Corinthians 6:19-20
**Proverbs 16:9
July 6, 2021