My Purpose in Life (Part 2)
As I said last week, my purpose in life is to be the most loving person I can be, first to God and then to others. Today, I want to look at how this purpose happened.
It started in 1996 while I was still in my Christian Fundamentalist stage and was overwhelmed with what I needed to think was right and wrong. In the movement I was in, it was already decided what the Bible meant, and so it was my job to get acquainted with it and to get others to see it that way too.
But in the June of1996, I read the Bible versus in the book of Matthew and would forever shape the course of my life. (Matthew is one of the four books in the Christian Bible
that talks about Jesus’ life and work.) Here is Matthew 22:36-40 (NLT):
It started in 1996 while I was still in my Christian Fundamentalist stage and was overwhelmed with what I needed to think was right and wrong. In the movement I was in, it was already decided what the Bible meant, and so it was my job to get acquainted with it and to get others to see it that way too.
But in the June of1996, I read the Bible versus in the book of Matthew and would forever shape the course of my life. (Matthew is one of the four books in the Christian Bible
that talks about Jesus’ life and work.) Here is Matthew 22:36-40 (NLT):36 "Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?"
37 Jesus replied, "'You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.'*38 This is the first and greatest commandment.39 A second is equally important: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'*40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments."
Upon reading it, I was moved by how “the entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” I figured if I could be the most loving person I could be, first to God and then to others, I would act according to the Christian scriptures instead of having to figure out every detail of what was right and what was wrong.
Another major shift in finding this purpose happened in early spring of 1999. I don’t really know why, but I picked up a Louis Fischer’s biography on Gandhi (Gandhi, His Life and Message for the World
); a book I read with no abandon. From there, I picked up The Autobiography of Martin Luther King
. The last book I read in this spree was Jim Bakker’s book, I Was Wrong
. It was the book by Jim Bakker, a Fundamentalist TV evangelist in the 1980’s that showed me and what I was becoming in juxtaposition to the lives of people like Gandhi and King. It was then that I started to push into what I believe and what I believe love is.Most of the foundational concepts I have of love where birthed out of these experiences. I realized love was a daily experiment. I realized love is not a definition, but a direction like east and west. You and I can never reach a destination where we can truly say we are now in “east” or now in “west.” But we can head in the direction of love (as with east/west) and always be on our way. And because of the immensity of love, we will always be at love's beginnings.
In time I found out that in the world of Christian Fundamentalism, love is just a concept in the greater judgement of a legal framework of right and wrong or an emotional release. But, those views of love are part of who I am and a large part of the framework of what and who I’ve become.
What kind of frame work of love do you have? Is there any big moments in your life where you committed to love?
