I’m thirty weeks away from my thirtieth birthday, and I’ve started listing things I want to do before I hit big 3-0. Nothing crazy like bungee jumping or skydiving—the list is full of simple activities like re-watching the Avengers movies chronologically, finally learning to ride a bike, and trying a new cuisine. But with the newness and excitement of my twenties slowly moving into the rearview mirror, I join other twenty-nine-year-olds asking the bigger question looming over the next decade: What is my purpose?
It’s valid question, one that even characters in the Bible asked of themselves. King Solomon wrote an entire book about trying to find his life’s purpose in money, women, and pleasure. But Solomon came to the conclusion, “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:3).
That’s not the kind of answer we like to hear, though, when it comes to our purpose. In our hyper-individualized culture (even Christian culture), we prioritize a purpose that is unique to us. We’ve overbuilt the concept of purpose, believing each person has a singular, specific purpose to life that they must work to find—or their life might be meaningless.
While God does sovereignly ordain meaning to each person’s life, it’s not the flashy concept that’s perpetuated by one self-help book after another. Our culture says that we are the leading actor in our own story—we must discover the narrative that will lead us to our happiest ending. Yet Solomon tried to write that story for himself, and it fell flat. Instead of the leading role, we are actually each a supporting character in God’s story of redemption. These minor roles don’t make our lives less purposeful, but more. Instead of trying to write our own fleeting story, we’re part of a story that will last for eternity. It takes faith, though, to lay down our own ideas for grandeur and accept God’s role for us in his story.
Continue reading “A Small Part of the Story”