This year’s Oscars ceremony highlighted a number of songs from movies, including Best Original Song winner, “What was I made for?” The song includes the lines, “I used to know but I’m not sure now / What I was made for / What was I made for?”
The question of what our purpose is, who we are, is not a new or unusual one. For instance, thousands of years ago, Moses asked God, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11). And King David asked, “Who am I, O Lord God?” as God promised him and his people a successful future (II Samuel 7:18).
It brings to mind a time in my life when I was earnestly asking this question. I had just returned from a summer study program abroad and was working a semester-long job before returning to college to complete my degree, graduate, and launch into “real life.” But I didn’t know what I was launching into: I had no job and no home base, and prospects didn’t seem particularly rosy.
At the time I was reading from cover to cover a book called Prose Works, which is a compilation of texts written mainly by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science. On page 165 of “The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” I came across this amazing statement:
“As an active portion of one stupendous whole, goodness identifies man with universal good. Thus may each member of this church rise above the oft-repeated inquiry, What am I? to the scientific response: I am able to impart truth, health, and happiness, and this is my rock of salvation and my reason for existing.”
Though this was part of a letter Mrs. Eddy wrote to a group of church members, it speaks to spiritual truths that apply to everyone. God Himself is infinite, “universal good”; and “stupendous whole” includes His entire creation, since God is the source of all good and is All-in-all. Christian Science explains that we are all the spiritual offspring, or reflection, of God.
So when I read this passage, I took the first sentence as an invitation to claim my identity as an “active portion” of God’s universal, whole, stupendous goodness. Further, it is natural for each of us, as an active portion of God’s complete goodness, to express the many attributes of that goodness – including “truth, health, and happiness.”
This is our fundamental purpose: to express the goodness of God. Our ability to do this has nothing to do with whether we are in one place or another, or doing this job or that job. Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we carry our God-given purpose – our reason for existing – with us. We are inherently able to know and impart qualities such as integrity, wholeness, and joy, because we eternally reflect those very qualities from God.
In other words, we are always equipped to go about our heavenly Father’s business, as Christ Jesus referred to (see Luke 2:49). There is nothing safer, more solidly protected, or more secure than being about the business of expressing God’s love. Doing so in daily life requires that we stay tuned in and listening for God’s loving guidance, which is a secure rock for us to stand on.
Reasoning along these lines brought a calm expectation of good and a deeper sense of purpose. And anytime I was feeling a little rocked or unsure about my future, I returned to these ideas, praying with them until I would again feel assured of being loved and cared for by God.
As for my launch into post-college life, I did find employment. My first few jobs were pretty mundane, but when I paused and looked at the work through the lens of those lines from Miscellany – Am I striving to impart truth, health, and happiness through my work? – and could honestly answer with a yes, then I knew I was on the right track. I continued praying, and soon my career blossomed with more engaging activities and even more opportunities to outwardly express God’s goodness.
Wherever we are in life, when the question of purpose presents itself, we can look to God for our true purpose, which brings a deep calm, a restored trust in God, and a mental stillness that enables us to respond to God’s, divine Love’s, guiding. This is true for each and every one of us.
