The Purpose-Vested Life

“I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of life and the joy of work harmoniously combined.”

~Albert Einstein.

There really is an enticingly inspirational wisdom to this quote above of Einstein’s.

In the following poem I’m trying to capture in words the alluring sense of innate satisfaction that is beyond the self, when the self is sown wonderfully deep into his or her purpose—and lost (in the biblical sense of Mark 8:35) to that love.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Swung home to purpose,

And scarcely made aware,

Meaning about it lurks us,

Bounds us now to stare.

Joy’s beset our golden spot,

Until now confused,

Why is this so good our lot,

Why not battered and bruised?

Something so wonderful,

Yet hard to understand,

Protects does this from a fall,

Feet grounded to the land.

So that now we’ve become,

Bigger to our cause,

No longer are we partially numb,

It’s like we’ve changed the laws.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

This is how we feel when we’ve come home to our cherished purpose. Everything else pales into insignificance for at last we have context for meaning. It really does feel that we’ve actually changed the laws to suit our needs. The fact is we’re only now starting to live by the laws of wisdom that have always existed. Alignment to these is now more or less ours.

Sometimes, as we look back, we can find we’ve arrived at this place rather serendipitously. We didn’t intend on getting so much out of this. It just evolved.

The Inherent Value of Loved Work

One of the key themes of Ecclesiastes is work: enjoying it; finding fulfilment in it; the meaning of it (see Ecclesiastes 2:24; 3:22; 5:19 and 8:15). There is hardly a better combination than finding purpose in work and, in that, resting—in the spoil of the resultant thoughts. Work feeds our senses of satisfaction.

Work is rather a suitable distraction from an oft-confusing life that will have us belching in despair without it and the meaning it provides.

The greatest challenge, then, is to find work or a passion that we can absolutely fall in love with. Then we are gifted from God with something that nobody else could ever give us. God has this thing (or things) for each one of us.

That is joy for the future for what is invested now is sure to bring us handsome dividends—both tangible for us to enjoy and intangible for others to enjoy, and if a legacy, even the better.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.