Monday, March 4, 2013

Gifts, Meaning and Purpose in Life


“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away!”
— Dr. Ike Reighard
There are, of course, many answers to the title of this article; many worthwhile and valid answers. This is but one thesis with which we can hang on to, and the beauty of this one is it holds true to the Ancient Path of blessing—when we bless the Lord, the Lord blesses us.
All we have to do is find out what blesses the Lord by what we can do.
Intrinsic to what blesses the Lord is what the Lord has given us: our personalities, our experiences, our abilities and capacities, our struggles, our hearts, and our gifts. Perhaps it is the last of these that holds the secret to our passions—that our gifting entwines our personalities, experiences, abilities, capacities, struggles, and our heart, for what and how we may give.
Our giving pleases God. And pleasing God is the purpose of life.
***
Probably the most intriguing of all challenges in life is to find our path; to find our calling; to establish ourselves—our identities.
What’s central to this exercise is to find our gift. Of course, we have many. Though some gifts hold a special significance, one gift may blow the rest away in determinations of passion that well up effervescently; that which we can barely control.
Tremendous meaning is found in discovering the gift that sets our lives on fire, igniting ours hearts towards the potential that was inlaid possibly since before time immemorial (so far as we were personally concerned).
God has gifted all of us in special and unique ways to make a difference in life; not for ourselves, but for his glory. And when God is glorified in and through us, God is blessed, and we, very personally, are blessed in that transaction.
By that transaction we are being transformed more from glory to glory.
***
So, finding our gift—that thing that sets our hearts alight—is probably easier than we think it is, but we tend to limit ourselves by not going after it. We think of the length of the journey required in developing our gift: the years of study or the investment of time in gaining experience, credibility, and points on the board. We get dejected.
Expanding on our gifts requires commitment—that goes without saying.
With commitment we find not only are we blessed by God in being a blessing to God, but God asks us to do something bizarre: when we have this thing we are to give it away.
The best of gifts are given away.
We learn that the best of blessings occurs within us as we give our gifts with absolute abandon.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

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