My friends know of my involvement in a men’s organization called the Mankind Project (“MKP” for short). As part of this involvement, I was called on to visualize a mission, something grand and all-encompassing that expresses my purpose in life; my mission is to create a world of faith and hope by sharing my truth. At a recent meeting, I was challenged to take some immediate, realistic and achievable action in furtherance of this mission. My choice was to commit to updating this blog at least once between then (Wednesday night) and this coming Monday.
How is writing this blog related to my mission? My truth is all about being real with myself, and about removing the masks I so often wear in public that get in the way of letting that true self shine forth. My faith and my spirituality are important parts of that truth, are in fact two of the primary media I use for defining what is true about who I am, what I am, where I am. So, this blog is how I share those aspects of my truth.
The challenge to make this commitment to update the blog came at a timely moment, as I have become lax in maintaining both the discipline of performing the Daily Office and the discipline of blogging my thoughts as a form of meditation—a nifty convergence on its own.
Then I looked at today’s readings (Ecclesiastes 11:9-12:14, Galatians 5:25-6:10, and Matthew 16:21-28) and an even more powerful convergence occurred to me. Ultimately, the mission challenge serves to pull the mission into reality, to connect my daily mundane reality to the greater purpose I aspire to. These readings ask us to do the same. “Remember your creator in the days of your youth” says the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: lift your consciousness up from the immediate pleasures (and pains) of daily life and consider why you’re here. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, asks us to remember why we toil in the fields of faith: “for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.” And, finally, Matthew’s gospel recounts how Jesus rebukes his disciples for setting their minds on human things instead of divine things, challenging us with one of the most beautiful and terrifying passages in all of scripture: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
So in all life’s little moments, the good and the bad, remember that we all have a purpose here. Live life, but keep God in mind.
