Purpose

Here among the shadows hung deep and black, cast against adjacent walls; our minds wander aimlessly through the burning questions we have managed to escape for part of another day. However, in still times when our minds break our elusive game of escape those burning questions arise with a defiant air; screaming to the forefront of all thought and attempted imagination. You all know the questions I’m talking about. They are the ones we hardly bring up because the answers are either too elusive or too broad or too relative or too…always too everything, too big and too much and too heavy to dwell on for any length of time.

Despite the size and depth and uncertainty of such questions, WE MUST think on them often. We must hold a fondness for them. To be well acquainted with every single one of them: for these questions are the key to what we are missing.
There are passions burning so deep in all of us-even for those who say they have no passions, at some point you did, now you may be so crafty at pushing them away that you have forgotten them altogether; this does not negate the fact those passion did rage. And somewhere in that hollow shell of humanity bearing the image of someone so other than human, those passions still exist.

These passions point us home.

I’m not talking about sexual passion, monetary passion or half formed emotional passion. I am speaking about the deep kind, born of years of looking out on the world and feeling something move in us every time we hear or see or feel. It could be art, music, literature, people, plants or whatever, but those passions are a direct link between the part of “us” that society has rendered and the side of “us” that they have never been able to touch.

The potential resting there is not able to be measured. I heard a man say once that passion always precedes purpose… and there have a nagging question…

What is my purpose?

It nags and aches and festers until we either beat it down so badly we forget that we ever thought it or embrace it and find that those passions locked in us move us toward the purpose we so desperately want.

Purpose is a sword in the mouth of many people. Those who don’t know it are cut viciously and refuse to pursue it from fear. We look at those scars and scoff, laughing at ourselves for ever giving flight to such a fancy as living with purpose. Our world in its broken state teaches us that purpose was lost a long time ago. That people don’t live for purpose, they live to live. This lie is destroying the lives of thousands.

There are others though who learn to use that sword and cut through every obstacle blocking their path. And those people look at their scars and value, in greater measure, what it took to get where they are.

We have to listen to the little things cause they are always first to know when the big things come.

And when those little passions flare, we have to stop and ask “why does this thing always move me, why does it keep coming up, why am I always captured by it?” Those answers will not always be readily available but by choosing to pursue a passion we find our purpose.

By questioning ourselves we will be forced to find answers or at least seek after them. Those answers could lead us to places we may have been blind to but they are sure to lead us.

It is of no small task to live in a place of purpose; it will challenge and refine us push us to the limits of who we are. But there is a fulfillment there that cannot be had from any other place.

We must lay hold of our purpose and pursue it violently; with passion and faith enough to keep us running after it that even after having no favor come we may one day happen upon it and from there begin to live as an effective change in a world that is always looking for a reason to live.