A Passionate Quest to Live for Others

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a person while they live.”

— Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965)

What is life without a unique you-shaped purpose? Rekindling our purpose, keeping its fire stoked, we experience joy again, vitality, and renewal... the blessings of Abundant Life. Or perhaps for the first time. It’s never too late to surrender ourselves to living boldly in the direction of our purpose.

It’s what we’re here for.

But then comes a balancing act, for with passion comes the tenacity to live, and then possibly, later on, the potential for or the reality of burnout. Living a passionate life is living on a knife’s edge.

Fear of burnout, however, should not dissuade us from living life to the full, so there is a motive—purer than all others—that transcends the potential for fatigue.

When God is the centre and heart of our purpose, when we have given our lives away in order to gain the only life we can get, we are gifted the capacity to love that banishes desire of reward. Oh, this is a fabulous life! To serve in the redeeming of our purpose, and do it because we want to, because we have fallen in love with it, life takes on a transcendent quality where we might bound out of bed in the morning in order to simply get to work again.

And life just gets better.

Then, at the appropriate times, because our purpose is not about us, but about others, we quietly take our rest and reflect on the blessings of God in others’ lives in order to be encouraged ourselves to continue. We don’t feel bad about resting; we know we need it; we enjoy it!

This passionate quest to live is centred on God, but, in that, it is centred on others. The more we give them, even secretly, without thought of reward or recognition, the more God gives us. Why would we want to reward or recognition when we know that God rewards love in the eternal realm, even as we experience it within the body—like when we moved with goose bumps—a special anointing of blessing by the Holy Spirit.

When we understand that God’s reward and recognition is all we need, we no longer settle for, or even desire, recognition or reward from our contemporaries. Sure, we may need to be reminded from time to time, but knowing God is blessed by our service to others is enough reward and recognition in its own right.

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The best purpose of all is a purpose where we give ourselves away for others without any thought of reward. Then we know God has won our hearts. Then we know God more fully than ever before. And the heights of blessing are ours.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.