Meant to live

Life gets in the way of living sometimes. The daily grind of jobs, bills, and responsibilities can feel like a vacuum sucking the joy out of your life, replacing it with a suffocating discontentment that constantly tells you tomorrow will be different, but tomorrow never comes. We keep going around and around, hoping to be freed from the mundane and enter the story as the hero, or even as the villain. Anything but just an extra or afterthought. And yet, most of us….well, we’re just living life and getting by. We aren’t saving the world, and (thankfully) we’re not out robbing banks and wreaking havoc, either. I say, “We” in order to frame this in the third person and avoid the vulnerable honesty of “I”. I don’t like to say “I” because as soon as I do, “I” become responsible for the confession and “I” have to either continue in the same pattern or make a choice to change. If I generalize and say, “we”, I can stay personally removed from the indictment, remaining anonymously among the “we”, and sharing admission amongst the other 8 billion humans. So let me rephrase this to be clear. “I”, not “we”….I sometimes find myself simply living, surviving, treading water, and struggling to keep my nose above the waves. However, I’m grateful that’s not the end of my story. There is more, my friends. More for me, and more for you as well. If you feel like me at times, stuck in a maze wandering around looking for cheese only to realize the maze is just a circle going around and around, let’s pause a moment and discover the “more” that is available.

With infectious joy pumping through the speakers, the combination of piercing lyrics and a genuine smile radiates through the crowd. I’ve seen Switchfoot live in concert several times, and they never disappoint. Their energy on the stage is convicting and inspiring as Jon Foreman’s voice rings out, “We were meant to live for so much more. Have we lost ourselves? Somewhere we live inside.” Have we lost ourselves? More personally, have I lost myself? When I find myself simply coasting through life, disengaged and disconnected, have I lost or forgotten my purpose? It’s an interesting phenomenon that happens. When we ignore the reason for our existence, we end up just existing. Not thriving. Not fully alive. Not infectiously joyful. Just existing. I believe this is the key to the “more” that we were meant to live. It is in knowing and remembering our purpose. We set our eyes toward the purpose, keeping our hearts and our attentions fixed at all times. Like setting a goal, if I get too focused on the daily tasks and forget why I’m doing them, I’ll lose interest in the tasks because they were never the purpose. The goal is the purpose, so I need to keep my intentions focused on the goal so I don’t lose sight of the “why” and become disconnected from the goal. Similarly, our purpose must remain at the forefront of our thoughts, motivations, and intentions to keep our hearts from sliding into a dull and disengaged state of going through the motions of life but not really living at all. So, what is your purpose?

This can be a difficult question to answer. Believe me, I understand. I’d be lying if I said I have this all completely figured out. I lived much of my life in a perpetual state of confusion about my identity, purpose, and value. My identity was whatever someone thought about me, and my purpose was to try to make that impression as good as possible. The problem is that I could only keep up the facade for so long before the house of cards tumbled, and I discovered some serious flaws in the foundation I’d built. Somewhere deep in each of us is a heartbeat, a rhythm set to the tempo of our creator. His fingerprints are all over us, as we have been created by him and in his image. It is in God that we live and move and have our being. Our identity and our purpose. God is love, and therefore, as ones created in his image, we are to love as well. God moves with justice for the oppressed, so we should do the same. God proclaimed good news to the poor, which is what we ought to do as well. But these are all things we do. We love, we do justice, we proclaim good news, and we feed the poor, care for widows and orphans, welcome the foreigner, and so on and on. There is so much to do that we can lose sight of the purpose behind it and fall into a trap of doing instead of being. Our purpose is in the “being”. Being known and loved by God. Being thankful for life in our souls and the breath in our lungs. Being so overwhelmed by the kindness of God toward us that all the other good things just spill out to the world. Love is no longer a chore but just spills out onto your neighbor. Kindness isn’t veiled in feigned religious words but pours out of our lives on all those around us. Peace isn’t something we just pray for, but it radiates from our lives to bring healing to a world at war.

Sometimes it’s the same ol’, same ol’ mundane busyness of life that gets in the way, and other times it may be forgetting or losing sight of the deep purpose of our normal everyday. Whatever the reason, I have to remind myself that there is more. I choose to wipe the sleep from my eyes and remember I was created for more than just a ho-hum, mediocre existence. We were made to be a reflection of the creative genius of love in the flesh, of relentless hope in the face of darkness and despair. To do that, I need to once again get my eyes off myself, off my own, tiny little sphere of relevance. I lift my gaze to stare in awe at the magic and enormity of the truth that I, you, we were created on purpose. Created with purpose. As one of my favorite artists, Propaganda, says, “You are Heaven’s handmade calligraphy”. I stop viewing myself as nothing more than a sinner saved by grace. I am God’s handiwork; a masterpiece created to be a display of God’s love to the world. And so were you. So I choose the “more”. I choose to live fully alive, out loud with love and joy. I crank up the music and sing at the top of my lungs. I dance to the beat of God’s kick-drum pounding through my veins and remember that I was meant to live for so much more.