Life Purpose

For most of my life, I kept a tragedy to myself. An event that I witnessed at a young age altered my thinking forever. It fueled the way I approach life. In recent years, I began sharing how death changed my life.

When I was a freshman in high school, I saw a good friend of mine die. Paul Kartlick was playing basketball in PE class one day and tripped. He hit his head on the outdoor concrete court and died on the spot. One moment we were playing basketball and the next moment he was gone. He was 14 years old.

Once you’ve discovered your passion (so we are told) your life will become drenched in meaning and purpose. When you know what your life is about, you can face each morning with energy and vigour. You’ll no longer procrastinate. All your bad habits will fall away. Not even rainy days or Mondays will get you down.

So we are told.

For a long time, I believed my passion would strike me in a moment of inspiration, like a bolt of lightening. My passion would descend from the heavens in a blaze of glory, and I would suddenly know the purpose of my life. A booming Hollywood trailer voiceover would tell me exactly what I should be doing and when. From that moment, my life would have meaning and my problems would disappear.

You know that feeling when you’re in an interview and the spiffy looking professional on the other side of the table folds her hands, leans forward, and asks you a question you haven’t a bloody clue how to answer?

You do? Great!, because that’s where this story starts.

“Tell me about where you see yourself in ten years.”

I was at an evangelical Christian wedding last year and the groom’s father made an interesting point in what was a very inspiring speech. He said the marriage was going to be strong because it would exist for a purpose bigger than itself, it would exist for God.

In the past I know I would have thought that this was stupid because I have never been a big fan of religion. I’m still not a fan of religion but now I understand the benefits of living for something greater than yourself. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as you are living for something you receive some major benefits.

We’ve all seen friends there. We’ve all been there ourselves: overwhelmed, confused, lost in evaluating a big life dilemma.

What should I do with my life? What job should I take? Should I move or not? Should I stay with the good, secure option or take a riskier road that has the potential to be great?

Sometimes thinking about these questions leads us into a tearing-out-our-hair, overwhelmed, utterly confused state. Intricate pro and con arguments swirl through our heads. We’re swimming, unable to keep up with the multiplicity of factors to weigh and reason through, and fearful because we sense there is no way to rationally predict the best outcome. Thinking gets us more and more stressed, further and further away from a connection to our desires, our truths, to clarity.