Purpose?

Good morning, God, and thanks for this new day in our lives.  It's going to be an interesting day, spent at a track meet rather than in class, and I am looking forward to being outdoors most of the day rather than inside.  It makes a difference sometimes to get the fresh air and the sunshine rather than being in the artificial light for hours on end.

As time keeps rolling on and on, we find ourselves already in mid-April.  Sometimes it seems that time crawls, yet sometimes it flies.  Recently, it's been flying rather than crawling, which I suppose is good since we're approaching the end of the school year.  Who wants time to crawl when summer break is coming up?

But whenever I think about  time and the way it passes, I have to stop and consider my purpose here on this planet, and whether or not I'm coming close to fulfilling it.  Am I on the right track to fulfill a worthwhile purpose here?  Am I doing the right things or the wrong things?  Is my life one that's going to matter in the long run, or will I be completely forgotten the moment I pass on--or ten days after I pass on?  In all honesty, I'm not too concerned about being remembered, but I'm sure my ego would like to think that there are people here who will remember me fondly, or who will carry on some of my modest influence after I've departed.

I look at some people who don't do much of anything except watch television, buy groceries, eat, sleep, and watch more television, and I have to admit that I wonder at their purpose in life--are they really fulfilling a purpose now, or did they fulfill one earlier?  Are they just hanging on to life because they're afraid of moving on, afraid of the unknown?

And who says that we have to fulfill any purpose at all?  Isn't that my judgment of what we're supposed to do while we're alive creeping in?  Is there a purpose to any of this, or will everything we ever did be for naught when human beings are no longer able to live on this planet?  Perhaps our only purpose is to learn the lessons that we've come here to learn.  If I think about it too much, it all seems rather silly, rather pointless--but that's more me than anything else.

A reply:

Your purpose is to love.  To learn to love, to practice love, to receive love.  That's it.  If you over-intellectualize it (which I don't think you're doing, by the way), you can trivialize it by turning it into information or ideas that simply support your own perceptions, and life isn't to be trivialized because love isn't to be trivialized.

It's very easy to get caught up in the world's ideas of purpose and success.  It's easy to feel that you're "coming up short" when you feel that your accomplishments don't measure up to those of others.  And it's easy to look at others and wonder if they're doing what they should be doing and how that compares to what you're doing.  But life isn't about comparison, either--life is about you finding your own way by finding your strengths and using them, and finding your weaknesses and dealing with them, either by accepting them or turning them into something else.

It's okay to think about purpose, because if you don't you very likely end up treading water.  When you think about having a purpose to fulfill, then you're more likely to search out a purpose and try to fulfill it, rather than  spending your time doing things that really don't matter, such as watching television or doing other things that are truly passive.  Those things can be good from time to time as a sort of rest, but they do rob you of the motivation to do things that will make you feel much better overall.

Love is the most important power in the world.  Love will lead you to help others, to give, to encourage, to share, to motivate.  Love will help you to see your purpose, and that may range anywhere from bringing up your children well to treating your children's friends well to writing a book that will contribute to the lives of others--even if it's very few others.

Purpose.  You look for your purpose in life, and that's good.  But also consider the question from my perspective--if I created you as a piece of a much larger puzzle, then what might be your place in that puzzle?