Wanted Purpose, Unwanted Cluelessness
Another year approaches.
I sip on some wine as the quiet evening goes on. I want to break down in tears in my frustration with life, but my weariness of my own complaining convinces me not to. I turn up the TV, too tired and sore to do anything productive.
It’s just another night.
Life is not the yellow-brick-paved-full-of-flowers-and-hunky-dory road that I had envisioned. In fact, one of the greatest griefs to me is the fact that this surprises me.
The screen glares in my eyes, but my brain is elsewhere, not bothered. I think on the many questions I have now at 24, and can only guess I will be asking more every year.
Life is not the yellow-brick-paved-full-of-flowers-and-hunky-dory road that I had envisioned. In fact, one of the greatest griefs to me is the fact that this surprises me.
You can’t always get what you want.
I sip my wine again.
But what do I want? I recently woke up to the oh-so-shocking discovery that perhaps what I want is not really what I want, but what I think I want…what has been pressed upon me to want.
And if I strip that away, what do I have left?
Nothing. I want – at least I feel as though I want – nothing. I have everything I could have asked for, and yet I am unsatisfied. I am not without a loving family, a stable job, and a world to explore. But as I pour through my Bible looking up the word “purpose”, I am beginning to wonder if my priorities were not a bit off the mark. Not that they were wrong, per say, but perhaps I had heightened certain things that should not have been.
So it’s not entirely true that I am wanting nothing…I do want something, but what exactly it is is hard to say.
Christian bloggers, writers, and commentators (and whomever else I could find on Google) proclaim that the unfulfilled longing in Christian’s hearts is that of the desire to be united with the Father, to go home and finally enter the glorified, heavenly state, and be saved from this sinful world.
While that is probably true, and there certainly is a longing to be with the Father, what can I do now with this restlessness?
I have prayed. I have talked to God, so much, about this. I have confessed that I may have my anxieties on the wrong things, that I am worrying too much about this, but if I don’t address it, I may lose my mind.
Some of the questions I think on are of a philosophical sort: What is life? What is it to live? To say that living is to love, or work, or play, or search, or yearn, cannot be entirely true…but life does consist of all of these things. How then, as a single, Christian woman, can I choose my course in life? What does life look like for me, to live?
Ultimately, God knows the path I will take. I know that nothing man does is a surprise, for the Lord directs man’s steps.
But then how does one choose? I want nothing more than to please the Lord, but to do that I would like to have at least some inkling of whether pursuing music, graphic design, becoming a scientist, a wife, or a missionary would be in His will. Has He equipped me do to those things? Well, I have some talent and interest, but, I am by no means extraordinary.
People tell me this: Travel. Experience. You should find a husband, get married. Be happy. Fulfill your longings.
And yet my longings remain secret. Or perhaps just not there. Or maybe they are and I am keeping them locked up.
What then?
I finish my wine, letting sleep overcome me. Thinking on this is hard, and I wonder if this was not something meant to be. Who else in this world worries about their purpose in life, when every day they are fighting to even live?
But as exasperated as I am with this, I do not give in. I do not assume that I have lost my ‘purpose’, or that my directionless is to be permanent. I will continue to seek the Lord’s will in what it is He is leading me towards. That is all I can do, at this point.
A New Song 