Quotes about Purpose

Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.

The Holy Spirit is God desiring in you and through you—until it becomes your desiring too.

One place where I often see a positive focus and purpose is in the hardworking happiness of young mothers and fathers. Their new child becomes their one North Star, and they know very clearly why they are waking up each morning. This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the "need to adore." It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what the Hebrew Scriptures describe as "one God before you" (Exodus 20:3).

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Most

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted."7

Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than "those who are going to heaven.

In the second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness. As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.