Finding Purpose in Service
I’ve had an exciting week, traveling podcasts and audiobooks. Still, the icing on the cake was today, July 13th, 2024, as I had the supreme privilege of participating in my brother David’s wedding. I now have a new sister whom I can pick on! As is my solemn duty as her older brother. Over the recent months, I have been honored to have been involved in multiple weddings, and I have another four weddings I get to attend before we close in 2024!
I have found it is often easy to get caught up in life's problems and the things that may not go according to our plans. But it is in the moments of celebrating others and focusing on them that it suddenly becomes easier to bear our own burdens and sorrows. This thought gripped me as I recently watched the new movie from Angel Studio, “The Sound of Hope.” While the previous movie from Angel Studio focused on children who are the victims of being trafficked, this movie focuses on the needs of all the children who are stuck in the foster system. The true story of “Possum Trot Texas” is retold in this film. If you haven’t seen it, I highly encourage you to watch it for yourself and support spreading its message. It is truly inspiring to see the efforts of one community that gathered together and saw beyond their own issues and hardships and instead chose to focus on others and their needs. Through the efforts of this single community, which gathered together, they were able to help dozens of children. Together, they ensured no children were left in the foster system within a one-hundred-mile radius. I left this movie feeling inspired by their efforts and wondering what I could do in my own life.
Purpose Pursed
I keep returning to the question of what it means to live a purpose-filled life. Recently, I recorded a podcast with one of my brothers and his wife, in which we discussed what it means to live a meaningful life. In 2019, I found I had built my life and identity around someone. When that someone disappeared from my life, I suddenly found that my life seemed meaningless. Since that moment, I have spent hundreds of hours asking what it looks like to live a life filled with meaning and purpose. What I found as I began to examine my life is that it wasn’t that I couldn’t find some form of meaning and purpose in a relationship with a “significant other.” A level of purpose and meaning can be found in a relationship, but I found that she was far too small to deserve such adoration and attention. I don’t say that as an insult or anything toward her, but instead, I found that allowing a human being to become the thing within which I found my entire purpose and identity was crushing. As I began thinking through this, I saw the idea of idolatry in a brand new light.
Human beings are creatures designed for worship, and we all worship something in our lives. Some will spend their entire lives worshiping the holy dollar and the materials it can give. Others will worship the pleasures of their flesh, always seeking to live at the peaks of pleasure. I’ve written on this before, but the idea that we, as human beings, have an insatiable nature should give us pause for thought. If we as human beings all seem to have this hunger that can’t be satisfied by things that are finite, then should we not naturally be led to believe that we are creatures not meant for that which is finite (limited) but instead that which is infinite (unlimited)? For me, this is a revealing thought.
Recently, I found myself conversing with someone, and this idea took shape for me in the Garden of Eden story. When Adam and Eve were in the garden, they were fully human creatures with desire and hunger, many of which we now experience today. Yet before they took from the forbidden tree, they found that they were connected as if by an invisible tether to God, an invisible and infinite source of satisfaction. And so, in this period, the human creature whose appetite was meant to be aimed toward infinity was satisfied fully. And so it was only then in the fall when they severed that invisible tether to God, that they became hungry in a new way. Their appetite did not change, yet they found that the source of satisfaction could no longer be accessed as they once had. And so, over time, humanity would seek and find new depraved ways to satisfy those appetites.
As I meditated on this idea, I considered practical examples of this phenomenon. One of these is when someone first tries marijuana, they will often experience an incredible high. Yet what often happens is that they quickly adapt, so in an attempt to reach that high again, they will pursue something more potent. Eventually, through the process of escalation, they find themselves with needles in their arms. Another example of this can be seen in pornography, where someone will begin with “vanilla porn,” but over time, as they become numb to it and they soon move on to more depraved and often violent porn. This is well-documented in many studies, and it is known as tolerance and escalation.
Tolerance: This occurs when a person's response to a drug, activity, or stimulus diminishes over time, leading to a need for a higher dose or more intense experience to achieve the same effect. In your example, the initial high from marijuana diminishes over time, and the person needs to consume more potent substances to achieve the same effect.
Escalation: This is the process by which individuals progressively seek more intense or extreme forms of a substance or behavior to achieve the desired effect. This is evident in both drug use and pornography, as users move from less intense to more extreme versions in an attempt to recapture the initial experience.
In the context of addiction and behavioral psychology, this can also be related to the concept of "hedonic adaptation" or "the hedonic treadmill," where people return to a baseline level of satisfaction despite major positive or negative events or life changes, pushing them to seek new sources of pleasure or excitement.
We are a creature designed for good and perfect pleasure, something that can scarcely be imagined in our world today as ideas of pleasure are so intermingled with sexual perversion. Yet we see that when we aim only at ourselves, we may find some temporary satiation, but quickly, that satisfaction will disappear, and we will again be hungry; we will again find ourselves thirsty. Christ, when He meets the woman at the well, we see Him speak into this.
“7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” - John 4: 7-15
Jesus points us to an eternal thirst, and only in the “Living Water” can we find satisfaction again. Only by restoring that invisible tether we once had in the Garden will we be able to be satisfied again. I am still far from perfect sanctification and thus fail to be satisfied by God alone. Yet I find there are moments in life where I seem to taste it for a moment, where I find my hunger satisfied. Those moments I have found come most often in quiet moments of meditation and when I am investing my life in the service of others rather than myself. It is in those fractional moments when I manage to reflect Christ just a little bit that I find perfect satisfaction. When I choose to bear my own cross willingly while also taking upon myself the cross of another in whatever capacity is left to me, this hunger, this thirst in me, is satisfied.
We are called to be like Christ, and Christ poured Himself out in service of others, and it is in this pursuit that purpose and meaning will be found.
