Your Purpose

I met George Plasterer while a student at Asbury seminary…about eight or nine years ago, right?…his lunch table was a favorite spot of mine. Here is one example why, which he recently wrote – – –

Many of us who become aware of having a special purpose realize this only gradually, and sometimes, only in retrospect.

In the last century at the age of 86, George Herbert Palmer, who had been a professor of philosophy at Harvard for all of his career and had also taught in the divinity school there, published a small autobiography in which he discussed the things he felt he had accomplished and the many personal difficulties he had faced. But he ended by talking about the opportunity he’d had to do useful work over the years in helping more than 15,000 students with their education. He concluded his book with this statement: “As I see these things rising behind me they do not seem of my doing. Some greater power than I has been using me as its glad instrument.”

Thankfully, not all that awareness comes only days before we die!

Sandra Gibson, who graduated in 2008 from Ashland (Ohio) Theological Seminary with a degree in clinical pastoral counseling, writes about a “retrospective lens” that periodically enables her to catch a glimpse of how some of the random dots of life connect. “I suspect that one of the nicest gifts God gives us in our journey,” writes Gibson, “is a retrospective lens on life. We don’t always get clearly marked blueprints or maps, but we do get a connect-the-dots picture if we pause to look back over our shoulders.”

And sometimes what we see is how the “dots” of our lives have shaped us to be able to deal with something else that comes along. We may feel, for example, with some gladness or at least gratitude, that we were born to be a parent to a child who needs parenting even more than most. Or we were born to help a loved one through a dark valley. Or we were born to accomplish a certain task. Or, amid some great crisis, we discover that we have certain skills that we have picked up over the course of our lives that have made us ready to meaningfully help others in the crisis.

I saw Mother Teresa on TV in January of 1987. She was at a news conference. One of the reports said, “Many people call you a modern-day saint. What do you think of being called that?” Her response: “We are all called to be saints. I am called to be a saint in what I do with my life. You are called to be a saint in what you do.”

I doubt if many reporters are accustomed to receiving that kind of challenge.

But I wonder, do we dare to believe that we can be saints in whatever we do?