Finding purpose in life

For many people, finding your purpose in life is challenging. John Eldredge, on pp. 200-201 of his book "Wild at Heart," shares a story about how God communicated to him related to his life's purpose:

Several years ago I was thumbing through the introduction of a book when I ran across a sentence that changed my life. God is intimately personal with us and he speaks in ways that are peculiar to our own quirky hearts -- not just through the Bible, but through the whole of creation. To Stasi he speaks through movies. To Craig he speaks through rock and roll (he called me the other day after listening to 'Running Through the Jungle' to say he was fired up to go study the Bible). God's word to me comes in many ways -- through sunsets and friends and films and music and wilderness and books. But he's got an especially humorous thing going with me and books. I'll be browsing through a secondhand book shop when out of a thousand volumes one will say, 'Pick me up' -- just like Augustine in his 'Confessions.' Tolle legge -- take up and read. Like a master fly fisherman God cast his fly to this cruising trout. In the introduction to the book that I rose to this day, the author (Gil Bailie) shares a piece of advice given to him some years back by a spiritual mentor:

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs in people who have come alive.

I was struck dumb. It could have been Balaam's donkey, for all I was concerned. Suddenly my life up till that point made sense in a sickening sort of way; I realized I was living a script written for me by someone else. All my life I had been asking the world to tell me what to do with myself. This is different from seeking counsel or advice; what I wanted was freedom from responsibility and especially freedom from risk.

We cannot rely on others to tell us who we should be. We need to rely on God and his plans for us.

God's purpose for us

Do you wonder about God's purpose for your life? I know that I'm curious about His purpose for my life, and I think that I'm getting closer to the answer: to counsel adult children of divorce. I am one myself, and that topic is as close as one can get to my heart wound.

Jim Graff, senior pastor of Faith Family Church in Victoria, Texas, recently wrote in the Victoria Advocate about how God showed him the appropriate pastoral job:

But then I began to think, 'You know, I really should pray about it before I just go and take a church.'

So I prayed, and as I did God spoke so clearly to me from Scripture in this verse: 'It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way' (Proverbs 19:2).

Long story short, we turned down the offer in Philadelphia. And the opportunity opened up to become pastor of a church of what was then 80 loving families in what I consider the greatest place, with the greatest people any pastor could ever serve: Victoria.

The challenge is following God's purpose for our life. When we look at what he calls us to do, it might not make sense. But he's omniscient and we're not, right?