Post 3 - Understanding Your Purpose

Understanding Your Purpose

I previously told you that Virginia and I went on a trip to Belize with our daughter.  She has an amazing attitude, nothing ever bothers her so much she cannot laugh at it.  She knows her purpose, and she enjoys doing it.  God wants you to enjoy your purpose like she does, I’m confident of that.  God does not give you a purpose you will hate.

One of the indicators to show you have found your purpose is that you enjoy doing it.  That’s not the only indicator, of course.  Just because a young person enjoys rock music does not mean God has given them the purpose of being a rock musician.   If you are having success with some God-given ability, that is another indicator, an important one.  Look for it.

In a previous post, I mentioned three rules I learned while searching for my purpose.  I call them ‘Principles For Understanding Your Purpose.’ 

A Purpose Is A Journey

Principle # 1 teaches us that a purpose is not a job, as I previously thought it was.  Neither is a purpose a goal or a destination.

A job is an important part of your purpose because you spend a lot of time at it and it pays for your journey, but it is not your entire purpose.  I discovered that when I was given the early retirement.  A friend told me I could retire from my job, but I could not retire from my purpose.  He was correct.  I do not have to go to the office any longer, but the journey continues.

A purpose a not a job and neither is it a goal, such as building a dream house or accumulating a certain value in an annuity.   Neither is it a destination you intend to reach some day, like moving to Florida or to Hawaii.  Your purpose is more than any of those, your purpose is a journey, it is the journey of your life.

Before I could move on with my search, I needed to recognize this first principle, that a purpose is a journey. 

For me, it has been an exciting journey, keep reading and you will see.

God Is No Dummy

The popular book, The Purpose Driven Life, says that after we spend forty days reading the Bible verses it lists, God will provide a ‘revelation’ to show us our purpose.  It also says that to find our purpose, we cannot begin by looking at ourselves. 

Where do we look?  How will God reveal our purpose?  As I thought about that, I realized that God is no dummy, he plans ahead.

That is principle # 2.

When God gives us a purpose, surely he also provides us with a method to accomplish it.  So, if God gave me a purpose, he also provided me with some means, possibly some God-given ability.   If I could discover that ability, it would be my ‘revelation,’ it would point to my purpose.

I agree with the popular book that we should read the Bible because it shows us the way God wants us to live, but to find the specific purpose for which he created us, we need to discover the specific ability he provided us to accomplish that purpose.  This means the first thing we should do when seeking our purpose is to look at ourselves, and that is the opposite of what the book says. 

I wondered if God had given me an ability.  If I could find it, then I would have a good start at discovering my purpose.

Then came the darkest days of my life.

Christmas of 2004, the big news was not about the holiday.  A tsunami was sweeping across southern Asia and that dominated TV.  Thailand had been especially hard hit, many hundreds had been confirmed dead and thousands were missing.  Phuket was named as a city in the center of the devastation, a wave more than thirty feet high had smashed into it, and had swept completely across its nearby islands.

Our son was vacationing at an oceanfront resort on one of those small islands near Phuket.

When a tsunami sweeps across an island, it totally destroys everything in its path.  It washes away the resorts, the people in them and all records.  There’s no way to find out who was there or where they were staying.  Rescue teams rush to the scene, try to locate survivors, then collect the bodies of the victims.  They depend heavily on inquiries of relatives and friends to determine who was there, and to identify the victims.

Our daughter sent an inquiry so they would know our son had been there.

The first day, we did not hear anything.  Virginia kept her eyes glued to the TV, hoping for a glance of our son.  The second day we did not hear anything, and the third day was the same.  The situation looked grim.  The confirmed dead rose to the thousands, and the number missing was in the hundreds of thousands.  Our son was included among the missing.

We still held hope because he was not yet confirmed as dead, but that hope was fading.

Times like this are when a person needs faith.  Some will say I do not have faith because I do not believe I can perform rituals and then God will solve my problem.  Instead, I believe that I must adapt to what God sends my way, whether I like it or not, because God always prevails and I want that.  This also requires faith, you know.

I once worked with a Jewish man who had an amazing faith.  We designed computer systems together, and when a situation looked totally hopeless, he would say, “This, too, shall pass.”

He told me that his faith was based on history.  When his ancestors were slaves in Egypt and had no hope, God provided a miracle.  That miracle was called ’The Exodus.’  Crossing the sea was not the end of their problems, but they learned to hang in there, adapt and keep going.  All of them suffered and many died, but in the end God prevailed.

In times of trouble, my friend thought about the Exodus experience, and that carried him through. 

I have my own Exodus experience.

I was working for a manager who had a lot more ambition than ability.  I disputed his judgment, and he did not like that.  He would have fired me on the spot, but my work history was too good to allow that.  He was my manager, though, so he could give me enough new appraisals to push my previous accomplishments off the records.  He began the process, and he first made me ineligible for a transfer.  He had enslaved me, I could not escape until he had taken his pound of flesh.

I was living in Texas, my house had a big mortgage and was in the ranch country, beyond the limits where buyers were looking for homes.  It would take a long time to sell, so I was stuck there.  If I lost my job, I would be bankrupt before the house sold.  I could not get another job there because my employer was the only one in the area who needed my skills.

My situation looked hopeless.  I was sitting at my desk and thinking that I could not survive in Texas.  I needed to get to some other factory where I would be given a chance to prove what I could do, but I was blocked from getting a transfer.

I began silently talking with God about my hopeless situation, and the telephone rang. 

“This is Jack Stuart.  How would you like to come back to Raleigh?”

I had worked with Jack about ten years previously, had lost track of him.

“I’d love to Jack, but I’m not eligible for a transfer.”

“You let me handle that.” 

In a couple of days, I was sitting in Raleigh and Jack was explaining his problem.  He was responsible for instruction manuals of an important product that was costing the company more than a million dollars a month in service calls.  The instruction manuals needed to be rewritten, and fast.  No writer on his staff could do it.  With an expensive problem like that, Jack could override the block on my transfers. 

I went back to Texas and called a moving company.  God had opened a path for me across that sea.  That was my Exodus.

I rewrote the manuals, and the first customer to buy the product afterward installed the equipment without a single call for help.  I was back on the correct path, back where I needed to be.

From that experience, I gained the faith that no matter how hopeless a situation seems to be, God will prevail.  Some people may suffer and some may die, but God will prevail.  I needed to accept that.  I didn’t expect to ever see my son again, but my job was to hang in there and adapt, hold the remaining family together, then keep going.  God would prevail, and maybe someday I would understand.

That was on my mind constantly, and then an e-mail came from Bangkok.   Our son was alive! 

He had been miles out to sea and sixty feet deep on a dive when the tsunami came by.  It passed harmlessly over him.  He was at the very safest place he could have been, because a tsunami out on the ocean is merely a long and low hill of water.  As it reaches the shallows near a shore, that is when it rises up as a breaking wave and builds its tremendous force.

On that vacation, our son spent very little time under water, the scuba tanks do not hold enough air to stay down for long, and soon as the air runs out, the boat returns to the dock. 

Sometimes, a miracle is a matter of a normal event occurring at exactly the right time.  If our son had not been diving, he would have been on the beach when that thirty foot wall of water smashed ashore.

I told him that God must have a purpose for him, that’s why he was kept safe.

When he returned home, he gave me and Virginia two airline tickets to Belize.  He knew we enjoyed our trip there and wanted to go back.  He also gave me a Rolex.  I could not afford to buy such an expensive watch.

I asked if it was a real Rolex.

“If it isn’t” he said, “I wasted ten dollars with a street vendor in Bangkok.”

The airline tickets, however, were authentic.  Virginia and I returned to Belize, and I resumed my search for the scrap of truth in that Mayan folklore tale the guide told us.

This was an exciting adventure.  We explored the ruins of several abandoned cities and we also visited nearby villages of Mayans, descendants of the ancients who had mysteriously walked away from those cities.

We spent many days there, searching for the scrap of truth in the Mayan folklore tale.  That scrap of truth led me to a new theory for why the ancients abandoned their cities, and it also led me to find my purpose. 

I am now convinced that this trip, given to us by our son after his miraculous escape from the tsunami, was a part of the means God provided to help me find my purpose, whatever that was.   Did God also provide me with some ability?  If I could find that, would it point me toward my purpose?

Signposts

          The first principle I learned was that a purpose is more than a job or a goal.  The second principle was that God is no dummy, when he gives a person a purpose, he also provides that person the means, sometimes an event but often an ability, to accomplish it. Principle # 3 is God does not keep a person’s purpose a secret, he sends us indicators to show if we are on the right path or if we need to change direction.  I call those indicators ‘signposts,’ but you can miss them like I did before I learned to look for them.

As I tell the story about my search for the scrap of truth in that ‘evil spirits’ folklore our Mayan guide told us, I describe more than exploring the pyramids and the cities that were abandoned a thousand years ago.  I also describe the way God provided for me to achieve the purpose he had planned, and I tell about the signposts he sent to warn me when I strayed off the path.

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