Life Purpose Is Not A Target You Can Hit

What do you do with that nagging feeling of needing to do something important or meaningful with your life and not knowing what that is going to be? Do you shove food in your mouth when Aunt Peggy keeps asking you what your 10 year life plan is at Thanksgiving? Do you change the subject when colleagues at work ask what you plan on doing with your life after you retire? What do you do in those situations?

Then you meet those people who seem like they have always known what they were going to do with their life. They were setting their bedroom up as a classroom, teaching their stuffed animals basic math while they were still in diapers, and now they are a teacher. We run into the guy who already had a non-profit organization started before walking out of the office for the last time.

We hate those people.

We don’t really hate them, we are just jealous of their clarity in life. Why does it seem that some people get this clear picture of their future early, while most of us are left wondering why it is so difficult to figure it out for ourselves.

The voices telling you how to figure it out aren’t that helpful either.

“Just do what you love.”

“Find what you’re passionate about and do that.”

“Do what you are good at.”

“If you could only do one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

While these are interesting questions to wrestle with, they don’t necessarily bring clarity. There are a lot of things I love to do and a few things that I am good at, but I can’t see how those things alone are going to bring purpose and fulfillment in my life.

These ideas also depict life purpose as some target you have to hit. It’s as if there is this one thing you were created to do, and in order for you to find purpose and fulfillment in life, you have to find that one thing. That one thing you love, that one thing you are good at, that one thing that you want to do for the rest of your life.

This view on purpose can elicit fear as you begin the journey of purpose. You ask questions like “What if I miss my opportunity to find purpose?” or “What if I am wrong about this?” We can get so fixated on a single goal that we can actually miss the opportunity to find our unique purpose in everyday experiences and relationships. And if you are one of the few lucky ones to actually accomplish hitting “the target,” it can leave you feeling disillusioned. I have talked to people who have accomplished their life goals fairly early. Rather than being ecstatic about it, they made a comment like, “There has to be more to life than this.”

Life purpose as a target often times falls very short of a person actually finding meaning and fulfillment in life. We are way more complex than that. Life is way too deep to limit purpose to a single target to hit.

I want to give you a new way to look at purpose:

I know some may object to the idea of God and purpose being connected to what God is doing. For you the word “God” may conjure up a number of different images, some of which may be very negative concepts. In the healthier representations of the divine, God is seen as love. Maybe that picture helps when trying to understand where I am going with this. Purpose can be seen as the intersection between identity and what love is doing in the world.

Let me illustrate it with a picture:

The circle on the left represents who you are. Everything about you. Your personality, strengths, passions, burdens, experiences, dreams, and more. The circle on the right represents what God is doing in the world. What love is doing in the world. The things that are happening that are making a positive and lasting impact in the world. Reconciliation between people. Care for those in need. Where things are moving from brokenness to wholeness. The space where these two circles intersect is where you will find purpose, fulfillment, and meaning. This space is where your identity connects with what God is doing in the world.

The more your understand about yourself, the more you explore who you are and how you are wired as a person, and the more you see what God is doing in the world, the bigger this space becomes. You will be able to see more and more opportunity to live out purpose and direction in your life. The opposite can happen as well. If you invest all your time just trying to understand who you are but never pursue understanding what God is doing in the world, you are going to miss out on how you connect to a deeper sense of meaning. It is going to be hard to find those areas that you were created to connect with. If you spend all your time exploring what God is doing but never explore how God has wired you, it is going to be difficult to understand how you connect with what God is up to.

Where do you begin? I’m glad you asked…

Remember those questions we talked about before? “What are you passionate about?” “What are you good at?” “What would you do if you could only do one thing?”

Ask those questions and more…

How would you describe your personality? Have you ever taken a personality test?

What are the experiences, people, media that have shaped you the most?

What is something that weighs on your heart when you think about it?

Keep asking questions, but don’t look at them individually. Look at them all as part of the circle that describes who you are as a person. Start connecting the dots between those answers, then open your eyes to how they intersect with what God is doing in the world!

It is never too early or too late to begin exploring these two circles. In the upcoming posts I am going to work through some additional insights into this view of purpose that will add clarity and direction to the conversation. If you follow our publication UncoverYourPurpose, we will also guide you through ideas and exercises to help you understand yourself better. You will be introduced to stories and insights that share how God is moving and working in our world!

Pursue purpose in your life, not just a target. May you find a deep sense of meaning and fulfillment in your life as you uncover your purpose!

Related posts:

Why do I do it? Climbing scares me. Not just a little bit, but in a horribly unpleasant way. Yet, I always do it again. I forget what it’s like to be scared, and I scare myself again. Looking back at…

In a year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Asia-Pacific region is increasingly embroiled in an atmosphere of China scepticism. Diplomatic tensions between Australia and China have arisen in…

Flutter merupakan SDK besutan Google yang ditujukan untuk mobile apps development yang memiliki kinerja tinggi. Mobile apps yang di kembangkan dengan Flutter dapat dipublikasi ke platform Android…