What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (4 page)

There is no ultimate, lasting purpose outside of Him. There is no eternal meaning for life and death outside of Jesus, because He is God. He is the author of our lives, and only He has the right to define us. We will never be content until we are what He intended us to be. He designed us for Himself, and until we are fully His, we will feel off balance, uncentered, empty, and aimless. Our life is wrapped in Him, and only when we see Him, do we ever see ourselves. By beholding Him, we become like Him, therefore fulfilling our primary life purpose.

A
T
F
IRST
G
LIMPSE

I was eighteen when I first began to catch a glimpse of Jesus’s story and get caught up in the bigger picture of what He wanted and what He was looking for. I had decided that the only hope of finding purpose in this life was to find purpose in death, and the only answers to life after death were my conclusions about eternity and God. I became preoccupied with knowing God and trying to understand His ways. I knew that until I settled what I believed about God, I would never fulfill my purpose in life because everything outside of Him was temporary and fragile. I started to read the Bible and ask questions. I tried to learn to pray and to fast as a means to know Him. I was not good at any of these things.

I remember being in my bedroom, reading the Book of Exodus, wondering why Jesus wouldn’t just show up and talk to me face-to-face as He did with Moses. I thought, “This would be so much easier if You would just sit here in front of me and have a conversation.” The invisibleness of God was the big argument I had with Him.

I realize it is presumptuous for me to ask for a face-to-face encounter, but I think He smiled on my youthful zeal that dared ask the Genesis 1 God to stand in front of me!

Prayer was hard, the Bible was mostly boring, and I didn’t understand fasting. I would try to pray but couldn’t figure out how to sustain it. I tried to read the Bible but found myself distracted. He was smiling on me all the while though, and He was calling my heart to Himself.

At nineteen I decided to move to Kansas City and attend a Bible school there. My idea was to move to Kansas City, go to Bible school for a year, learn the Bible, and gain understanding on how God communicates with people today. I wanted to know Him, and I wanted that to be my supreme purpose. I knew everything else in life would flow from this fountain.

I was fresh away from home, tenacious for truth, longing for God, working hard, and never sleeping. It was a good year and a trying one. In the midst of all of this, I was experiencing severe pain in my right leg because of a tumor that was growing in the nerve of my leg. I was in so much pain that I rarely slept. Like most college-aged kids, I was up late and awake early. I was in a whirlwind of activity with this nagging hunger for truth, though I did not have time to satisfy it.

Jesus’s leadership is perfect, and He is kind in the way He woos us to Himself. All of these years later, I look back on that time of my life with tears of gratitude. I had joined Bible school in order to “know God.” I moved away from home and came to a place rich in understanding. But in the midst of my pursuit, I became so busy, social, and frenzied that my faith was weakened instead of growing deeper.

I thought Bible school was the answer to my questions, but I could not get the impact of much of the truth I was learning. However, I was growing in understanding, though it was small and seemed insignificant. I was moving forward little by little. In a way I did not fully grasp, I was growing in faith as my paradigm of Jesus was slowly changing.

The one class that marked me the most that fall was the class Mike Bickle taught on the Song of Solomon. I had never heard such magnificent truths about the purpose of Creation. I had never heard Jesus desired relationship with humanity, even in our weakness. Mike also talked about the longings of the human heart that God put in us, and how those longings cannot be repented of but they are escorts into God’s heart and into the supreme story of God and humanity. He talked about our desire for meaning and purpose and how it is primarily found in Jesus. It was as though the strings of my heart were being played, and I was being beckoned into a great mystery. I was still on a swinging pendulum between faith and unbelief, but something about the truths in this class drew me like a magnetic force into the divine story of God Himself.

I wasn’t able to grasp all that was being said. I was too busy and chaotic. But like everything in life in God, a seed had been planted that would one day blossom and bear fruit. I did not realize, at the time, the impact that this class was having on me, but the seeds were taking root.

During those months of being so social and scattered, living the student life, I would sneak away to the laundry room in the basement of the apartment building I lived in. It was the only place I could ever find privacy. I would sit in that basement, with its concrete floors and cobwebs, reading the Song of Solomon commentary. I would also read through the Bible, especially reading the scriptures pointing to what God is searching for. I would look out the small, dingy window near the ceiling of those dirty walls into the dark, star-filled sky and pray to the Invisible, “Is this true? Is this really how You feel? Do You have this kind of passion for me? Are You really watching me? Is all of creation about loving Jesus?” I knew if this story was real, it changed everything for me. If the story was true, then I would do anything and live any way in order to feel the impact of it. I wept in longing. I wanted it to be true. I hoped it was true, and in my foggy belief I reached out to lay hold of His heart, even as He was laying hold of mine.

Though these laundry room moments were precious to me, they were not enough to keep me from distraction during that semester. The lack of sleep because of the growing tumor in my leg, the proneness to too much social life, long hangouts, drinking coffee, and early mornings teaching three-year-olds made for a chaotic person when I went home for the holidays that year. Though frazzled and still full of questions, I was changing. Faith was working in me, though it seemed small and slow. That Song of Solomon class had made an undeniable impact on me, and something was pulling my heart that made me want to draw away and be with the Lord. I wanted to sit at my piano and sing to Him. I wanted to lock my door and pray to Him.

F
INDING
M
EANING IN THE
M
IDST OF
P
AIN

I went home for the Thanksgiving, and while I was there, I decided it was time to see a doctor about the pain in my leg. Little did I know that doctor appointment would keep me in Texas for several months, and I would not be returning to Kansas City as planned. It was at this time I was diagnosed with cancer. The doctor was shocked at the size of the tumor that was growing in my nerve and immediately scheduled an operation.

I spent that Thanksgiving in the hospital in Dallas. The doctors did not know if it was malignant or not, and they were not sure if they could remove the tumor and save my leg. There were talks of amputation or a lifelong foot brace, and there was much worry about the tumor spreading and possibly costing me my life. My world was changing in a matter of weeks as I stood at the mountain of my familiar ponderings on death and life.

Being nineteen years old and having cancer put me on an even faster pace in coming to conclusions about the purpose of life. I went through a couple surgeries and a round of chemotherapy that winter. I lost my hair around Christmas and became weak with the drugs that were meant to kill the remaining tumor. I can honestly say, this was one of the best times in my life. I do not believe God gave me cancer, and I believe in supernatural healing. I fought against sickness throughout this entire season, yet God drew me to Himself in the process.

The story of God I had heard through the Song of Solomon class was so fresh on my heart that I felt carried throughout this season. If the story was real, I had nothing to lose. I felt I was coming into the knowledge of my purpose in life and truly felt a grace on my heart that, looking back, was supernatural. Because I was sick for those few months, I had much time to sit, reflect, sing, write, and be with the Lord. I felt His presence strong as I thought about eternity and life. It was a sweet three months, even though I was in and out of the hospital. It all seemed small to me. If Jesus really felt about me the way that was described in the Bible, and if He was literally watching my heart, then I had it made and I had nothing to fear.

There was more to life than meets the eye, more to life than only pursuing the American dream, more to life than physical beauty, and even more to life than health and happiness. Eternity was being written on my heart, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Viktor Frankl wrote in
Man’s Search for Ultimate
Meaning
that “despair is suffering without meaning.”
¹
We can go through anything in life if we know that it has meaning. This became more and more true to me as I asked questions about suffering and death, even as a teenager seeking truth. My conclusions about the purpose of life were growing stronger, though I did not have the full application for them. Something was happening in me where my life dream was changing, and the perspective from where I lived that dreaming was changing as well. Even though my faith was small, it was growing.

Our definition of the meaning of life must transcend all life circumstances in order for it to be real. When I was healthy and feeling great or sick and in the hospital, I had purpose. If I had ninety years or nine months to live, the purpose of life had to be attainable in every circumstance. The ultimate meaning of human existence must be available to all, no matter their social status, education, health, beauty, or nationality, or else the Creator is not just. The purpose for which we were created is attainable by all who want it.

During these months of fighting with cancer, when my future was so uncertain, I could still fulfill the will of God for my life and have meaning and purpose. My definition of life began to change. I was still climbing that mountain of questions and still found my heart agitated at moments, trying to grapple with meaning and truth. In my youth I was like a swinging pendulum, going from contentment before God and having faith in Him to the opposite extreme of unbelief and frustration. But through these extremes my heart was becoming strong in my convictions.

When I see someone asking hard questions and fighting for answers, or when I see a person struggling with God, I don’t interrupt their struggle or tell them to get over it. God is not offended by our questions, and He is not nervous about our mind swinging like a pendulum. When we ask, in sincerity, without accusation, He leads us into truth. He wants to give us answers that are written on our hearts so that in the hour of the real shaking, we won’t move. It is healthy and good for a person to fight for truth and not to just believe what they are told. I will tell people what I have learned and boldly declare the truth of Jesus to those on their way to hell, but I will not interrupt the wrestling match of a sincere believer who is wrestling to know Jesus’s name for themselves. I look back over the years and see how many marvelous conclusions I came to in one season of my life only to doubt them in the next. And then I would work it out and end up in a deeper conviction after the whole exercise was done.

This is the way that truth gets written on your heart and what you really believe about life and God gets set in stone. The seasons of life test your beliefs, and it is good and healthy to ask questions without fear. Truth is the stone on which the soul chisels. At every stage you think you know what you are concluding and you think you have the sculpture as a finished product, only to find that it’s not quite right. The soul who seeks continues to chisels away at the stone of truth until it is formed with beauty and unshakable conclusions.

I had survived one battle with cancer and was changed because of it. I had a new measure of resolve to please Jesus as the supreme meaning of my life. I continued to climb my mountain of questions as I returned to Kansas City, a calmer and more focused person.

3
BEFORE HIS EYES

T
HROUGHOUT OUR LIVES
the desire for purpose comes up again and again, no matter what initially drives us. This is because of the power and the gift of disillusionment. Though disillusionment implies disappointment, it is a gift when it leads us to the truth. There are two things in life that lead us to our eternal purpose: pain or the fulfillment of pleasure. When what drives us is not eternal purpose but temporal accomplishment, we eventually face the end of it. Then when it is attained, it is disappointing or over so quickly that we are left with sadness because the dream that was driving us is no longer in front of us. Sometimes we feel aimless when we attain what once motivated us or we live in pain because we cannot get what we dream of.

I heard a famous movie star being interviewed. The host was asking him how it felt to finally make it in the movies after dreaming about it from the time he was a child. The interviewer went on with the questioning, asking how it felt to come through all of the trials in life he had to overcome in order to get to his dream. Everyone applauded the greatness of humanity demonstrated in how someone could overcome so much, then “arrive,” and become what they had always dreamed of becoming. The actor then surprised everyone with his answer: “It’s boring.” He said, “My whole life I dreamt of doing films, and now I find it’s boring.”

I could hear the near appalling disillusionment in his voice. He was shocked that the thing that had driven him and shaped him left him empty when he attained it. The stories go on and on of people who have been motivated by a temporary dream, only to attain it and then feel empty and aimless. Many others never attain their earthly dream, and they live in great pain over it. Their entire lives they dream of becoming something, and when they cannot get it, they are in agony and feel like failures.