“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
~Howard Thurman.
Perhaps the biggest reason for our dilapidated sense of wellbeing in life is we’ve bought into a lie.
We see all this need about us, and if not that, it’s the opportunities — to make money, create a reputation for ourselves, or forge a lifestyle — and we just sense the innate want to respond, often without challenging — really challenging — what it is we are here for.
Buying into a lie will not ever satisfy.
Breaking Open the Lie
Other people’s dreams will never be our dreams.
If we’ve achieved exceedingly well and even if we haven’t but we’ve tried, but we’re still not happy, there’s a reason. This reason is central to the purposes of the heart that still haven’t been found yet.
Blessed is the person who with honesty interrogates their lie and pushes on beyond it to their personally-held truth.
The world can give us nothing. Only from what God’s placed deep within our hearts can we get what is purposed for us; this is a life that we’ll live and die for.
Faith to Find
Sometimes we think we’ll get to a veritable no-mans-land even if we find our purpose. Perhaps the world won’t need what we’re purposed to give — that’s the doubt. The thing is the world always needs what we’re purposed to give, because the world needs people who are genuinely alive and who’ve become inherently honest about their place in life.
Having the faith to find our purpose is also very much about knowing we’re next to nothing as persons until we’ve actually found our purpose and then start living it. Our purposes can be as bright or as humble as we like — they don’t have to be about changing the entire world.
This sense of reason, notwithstanding our lack of overall wellbeing otherwise, should fuel our faith to find those things that will make us come alive.
It’s a Biblical Imperative
This is very much the gospel message — to put to death the ever-encroaching extrinsic life that is not truly us and to be ‘re-born’ to the intrinsic life that suddenly fits.
All we’ve done is become a vision that God’s always had for us.
This is the way that sees Jesus actually enter into us via the Holy Spirit, so we have been enlightened. The tragedy is sometimes, or perhaps many times, people do not recognise God in the transaction to transformation. God’s the one to be thanked.
Obviously, then, there are elements of the gospel message of salvation missing or lost in this, and anyway we’re digressing...
The imperative is to go beyond what life so far has dished us up.
In this we go on beyond that outer reality to the cherished inner reality that is real for us, however quirky that might be for the world. And then we have reason that convicts us to ‘do’ life with the welling energy never before known to us.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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