Do Different?

It has been observed that we live going forward, but we only find meaning in our lives by looking backward. We may not see the reason for things as they happen and as we have to face them, but when we get some distance on things and look back we see how life has been fulfilled.

Maybe it is the work of retirement to look back and see how things have gone. One obvious pattern in my life has been the constant moving. We moved about every five or six years at the beginning of my life and I ended up repeating that movement with my family. The moving made me a bit introverted, but they also made me independent and they provided lots of evidence that people do have many ways of doing things. Traditions and customs may be different but there are a lot of similarities in every place.


There has been a lot of attention given to the affirmation that we are all given a Purpose and our lives should be Purpose Driven. Looking back in my life I see that there were a number of events that moved me in a particular direction, and a number of choices that would have made possible a number of different careers. I have always thought that I might have enjoyed being a lawyer if I had not chosen ministry. I have also considered that I would have enjoyed buying run down real estate and "rehabing" it and selling it. But I have never felt that I had a single clear purpose in life; that I had one particular destiny that I had to fulfill. I had a woman tell me not long ago that we "are on this earth for a purpose and when it is done we will die." That may be so, but I have no idea what that purpose is.


My own conviction on that is that each of us has the great purpose to work to make a better community for all of us. Each of us has the calling to enrich the lives of all of us, because the time we have is short and what we can do is limited but we have a way of putting our efforts on the side of that which makes that time healthier, more enjoyable, safer for all of us or we can make it a hell of a mess for people. We can not do everything and we cannot do it all, but what we can do is something and we will find our own lives better if we do what we can.