Piloting Faith: What is your life's purpose?
A Word for the Day...
Like most people, I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to discern what God might wish me to make of my life. I have prayed, searched, talked, listened, probed, looked high and low, all in the hopes that I would find my one great calling. I grew up in churches where I heard sermons about “God’s will for my life,” and “finding my purpose-driven life.” These left me as a child thinking that there was one great thing I was supposed to do with my life, and my job was to figure out what that ONE thing might be.
Finding this task to be frustrating, I made promises to God like “if you just tell me who I am supposed to be and what I am supposed to do, I promise I will behave.” Today, I am incredibly grateful that that particular prayer was never answered. As the saying goes, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
What I know now is that finding purpose and vision for our lives is a process that can have any number of excellent endpoints. We can do lots of wonderful things with our lives that would be holy and pleasing to God. What God asks is not that we find the formula for the perfect life, but that we open ourselves to the richness and joy of living in the ambiguity of blazing your own unique trail.
In an article published in the Harvard Business Review about shaping life with meaning, Umair Haque wrote,
"...don’t start with your goals. Don’t start with your plans. Don’t start with your objectives. Start with your dreams. The bigger, the more laughable, the more impossible—the better. We feel as if our lives count when—and only when—we brush against our dreams, with the fingertips of our days. When we feel them; when we know them; when we become them."
At the end of the day, vision is a very simple thing. It is the joining of your passion with the world’s need. There are any number of ways to live into your vision. The question is what makes you come alive?
- Rev. Cameron Trimble, author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight
Blessing for the Week
Every day we experience hunger and yearning:
for food, for approval, for respect, for love,
for meaningful work, for any and enough work,
for home, for family, for friends,
for health, for healing, for hope,
for the departed, for the newly arrived,
for the green trees, for the cool clean waters,
for shade in the heat of the day, and for stars to light the velvet night.
Every day we are invited anew to be thankful:
for food, for approval, for respect, for love,
for meaningful work, for any and enough work,
for home, for family, for friends,
for health, for healing, for hope,
for the departed, for the newly arrived,
for the green trees, for the cool clean waters,
for shade in the heat of the day, and for stars to light the velvet night.
Our hearts beating in liberating flight, we soar in gratitude for all the gifts we have in this day, in this lifetime of being, and turn again to share this bounty with all that is. Amen and Blessed Be.
- Naomi King, UUA Minister