The Purpose

Who am I? What am I doing here?

Those were the first two lines of a (really bad) poem I wrote when I was in middle school many years ago. That sounds like pretty common angst for a 13-year-old, but I was surprised recently to hear similar musings from a 60-something woman.

As she's looking back over her life, she's asking "What did I accomplish? Am I where I'm supposed to be?" And the questions are not bringing her peace or comfort. I understand that she's experienced disappointments and struggles in her life. But it makes me think.

Is my life about my successes and accomplishments? Is it about leaving my mark, gaining worldly acclaim, and receiving glory and recognition? I'm thinking not. I'm thinking it's about my GROWTH through my experiences and the way I HANDLE successes and failures. It seems to me my life is about my learning and being conformed into the image of Christ through the various trials and blessings I encounter.

I wonder what reflections I'll have in another 20 or 30 years. I'm witnessing what appears to me to be depression and despair in some who are dying, others who are reaching retirement age. As I'm reading Ann Voskamp's book "One Thousand Gifts," some of her initial statements sound familiar:

Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out? (12)

Though I can hardly whisper it, I live as though He stole what I consider rightly mine: happiest children, marriage of unending bliss, long, content, death-defying days. I look in the mirror, and if I'm fearlessly blunt--what I have, who I am, where I am, how I am, what I've got--this simply isn't enough. (14)

We are such selfish and greedy people. It's all about me, all about what I want and don't want. But the rest of Ann's book (at least the four chapters I've read so far) is about learning to be grateful--really and truly recognizing and giving thanks--for the many blessings God gifts us with each day.

To learn how to be grateful and happy, whether hands full or hands empty. That is a secret worth spending a life on learning. (47)

C.S. Lewis said, to a man looking for fullest life: "If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad" (54).

And I think Ann is on the right track. A large part of my purpose here is to recognize God's presence all around me and thus to be grateful. If I take the focus off myself--who am I? what am I doing here? what have I accomplished? is this really the life I was meant to live?--and instead focus on who I am in Christ I will find peace and comfort, gratitude and joy replacing doubt, fear, bitterness, and depression.