Quotes About Purpose

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.

Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.

One place where I often see a positive focus and purpose is in the hardworking happiness of young mothers and fathers. Their new child becomes their one North Star, and they know very clearly why they are waking up each morning. This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the "need to adore." It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what the Hebrew Scriptures describe as "one God before you" (Exodus 20:3).

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

For many secular people today we live in a disenchanted universe without meaning, purpose, or direction. We are aware only of what it is not. Seldom do we enjoy what it is. Probably it is only healthy religion that is prepared to answer that question. Healthy religion is an enthusiasm about what is, not an anger about what isn't.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Most

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted."7

Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than "those who are going to heaven.

In the second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness. As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved.

So now we move toward the goal, the very purpose of human life, "another intensity…a deeper communion," as Eliot calls it, that which the container is meant to hold, support, and foster.

Most of us tend to think of the second half of life

What was God up to in those first moments of creation? Was God totally invisible before the universe began? Or is there even such a thing as "before"? Why did God create at all? What was God's purpose in creating? Is the universe itself eternal? Or is the universe a creation in time as we know it—like Jesus himself?

Is there any evidence for why God created the heavens and the earth? What was God up to? Was there any divine intention or goal? Or do we even need a creator "God" to explain the universe?

Maybe even sadder is the willingness to give your whole life producing items of no social benefit, or even destructive, like slot machines, tawdry luxury goods or nuclear weapons. Is that what a man wants to do with his one single chance at life? Money is not just about paying bills, it must also be connected with making some contribution to life, others and history.

Yes, I am saying: That the way things work and Christ are one and the same. This is not a religion to be either fervently joined or angrily rejected. It is a train ride already in motion. The tracks are visible everywhere. You can be a willing and happy traveler, or not.

All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. We are all en Cristo, willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.

All of us, without exception, are living inside of a common identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. Paul calls this bigger Divine identity the "mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made en Cristo from the very beginning" (Ephesians 1:9).