Week of September 27: What is Your Purpose?

What is life without meaning, without direction, without purpose?  Purpose gives us the desire to press onward, no matter how challenging life can be.

We overcome circumstances, situations, problems, and hardships when we feel we have purpose.  We become larger than our problems.  I’ve seen people survive events that should have ended their time here in this life and say, “It wasn’t my time.  I have more to do here.  I’m here for a purpose.”

Part of my purpose I think is to reach however many people I can to talk about compassion.  I think I am a catalyst to spark the desire to live in a more compassionate world in as many people as I can.  Out of my tragedy and to honor my son James, I have committed myself to this cause.

The interesting part of life is that we never know the effect we may have on others.  While I speak of compassion, maybe my words have different meaning for someone who needs to hear a message of hope.  Maybe what I say in my explorations and on my blog have an impact that is unforeseen.  In the legal arena, we call that unintended consequences of an intentional act.

My intentional act is putting forth a website and a blog where I focus on the message of compassion.  The unintended consequences are infinite.   My purpose, no doubt, will dictate some of those consequences.  My purpose will have some avenue of fulfillment through this medium.  My purpose now has room to breathe in a way it may not have before I took on this endeavor.

Since we cannot know prior to its fulfillment what our purpose may be, how can we determine what action we should take to ensure its fulfillment?  We may have a suspicion of what our purpose might be.  We may be convinced we know what it is.  But ultimately, we cannot know.  We are not meant to know.

There are tools to assist us in navigating this terrain.  Intuition.  That gut feeling that lets us know what action to take or not take.  Meditation.  Listening to the quiet voice of greater wisdom inside that provides insights and guidance.

I’m certain that when you endeavor to speak and act with a pure heart, you need not be concerned about the ripple effect of your life’s impact on others.  There is a universal law that you reap what you sow, that you attract what you radiate, that your thoughts create the reality that you live.  I ascribe to those beliefs.  I know them to be true.

I heard a story behind a song on the radio this week, “That’s How the Lost Get Found” by Britt Nicole.  She said that one day she was at the mall and she saw this woman, a stranger.  She said that God told her to go up to that woman and speak to her.  God didn’t exactly tell her what to say but she said God touched her heart and told her to go speak to this stranger.  Well, she didn’t.  She was afraid to.  This experience impacted her to such an extent that she wrote this song.

So, was part of her purpose to reach out to this woman or to reach millions more with the words of her song?

I don’t know the answer.  Without that experience, she would not have had the emotional turmoil brewing within to give the words the same impact.  Maybe she was meant to ignore that inner voice telling her that woman needed someone to reach out and say, “I care about your suffering and I desire to alleviate it.”  Maybe she was meant to take that initiative and is using the subsequent emotional turmoil to create message to reach a more widespread audience.

There is not right or wrong answer, only life happening and our struggle to understand it.