The Purpose of Life

You might be thinking that I am feeling the need to redeem myself after the last hamster post. Yeah, maybe. But really, this question is never far from my mind, and periodically the theme either comforts or torments me. Usually a bit of both.

We all have the same amount of time in a day, days in a week. God gives us all time; some more than others, some less, but for most of us that reach 30 or 40 or 50, well, we can't say we've not been given an opportunity to figure out and fulfill what life's purpose is.

At the end of the day, we do what we want to do. Ultimately the blame or reward of our actions is ours alone. We make decisions that shape our life. We do, I do, what I consider important. Maybe for me at any given time things very trivial are important to me. When I lose my spiritual bearings, even frightfully sinful areas of life can be, to me, important, or at least seem to be.

Still, the question remains...what is ultimately significant? Or, in other words, what is important to God?

It's tempting to enter into a discussion on being and doing here, something that is very much in vogue in our mission, as we talk about discipleship. I understand the distinction. But there's something within me that doesn't like it. C.S. Lewis is helpful. He states that we may never feel like loving our neighbor. But if we starting treating him as if we love him...we start loving him. The point is that true devotion and active service nuture each other. The process goes both ways. It's not only when I have a great devotional time in the morning that I will serve well. Serving well can have a huge impact on my devotional time. I can think of many times when the testimony of a new believer in a home Bible study totally enhanced my spiritual life. "Doing" can be joyful, encouraging, invigorating, even fun. Where have we gotten the idea that spirituality is somehow essencially monastic?

The question still remains. What is important to God?

Well, let's start with what I'm pretty sure it isn't. A life wrapped up in itself, and its needs, and its priorities and its possessions, a life closed off to people and to a serious interaction with the Living God, well, that can't be very significant, because any human can be like that (including Christians). All of us are like that some of the time, and many of us are like that most of the time.
A life like that is shielded, self-protected, guarded and ultimately...small. The same walls we use to keep others out keep us in. Such a life is musty, stale and petty. I've been there. Maybe you have too.

So maybe there's a hint of what it is in what it isn't. Life's purpose must transcend a closed system, the closed system of our small, introspective lives, but even more than that, it must transcend the closed system of the way the world works, and even nature itself. Our purpose must be linked into the divine, related to that which is unseen, connected to the breath of the Almighty. We must live with one foot in a parallel universe, spiritually schizophrenic in the best possible sense, so to speak.

Often I lose sight of the fact that my 10 year old son is my brother in Christ. If forget that Elena, who prays and witnesses every day of her life, is a huge, brilliant spiritual being in that other universe. I give my wife the bagel with less sesame seeds because I forget that the supreme role that I have been given is to serve her. I don't cry when I should, and get upset when I shouldn't.

Then suddenly I meet someone who is in tune. I talk to someone who says something like this to me, "I am willing to live under a bridge for the rest of my life if by doing that I would get my wife back." From a brand new believer..."I didn't get a cross on my forehead on ash Wednesday because, well, that just didn't seem like something God wanted me to do." And..."At first I thought, there's no way I want to be a deacon, but then I asked myself what I would say when God asked me some day...what did you do with the opportunities I gave you?"

Just right outside of our frame of reference, just behind a veil there is a Man who says, "Follow me." You can see Him, sometimes, out of the corner of your eye.