This is Purpose. (2019 Reflection)

Learning why I just can’t quit

For once, this should be a quick one! I’d hoped to end this year drastically different than how it started, but let me leave you with a beautiful and hopeful truth.

This is my life: I don’t want to fight. I feel like I never succeed. I want to quit so bad, but I can’t even do that. The other day, I asked myself why, and I realized that I’m too in love with my purpose — my God-given purpose.

That’s the only thing that keeps me going. If I’m honest, I’ve thought about suicide. I’ve thought about it a lot this year. Knowing who you are doesn’t make life better; it makes life manageable.

The fact that a God who sits high above the universe with no reason to consider someone like me whom he referred to as his active enemy would dote over me in all my wretched inadequacies and not only give me the opportunity to embrace his glory but consider me a significant part of his life’s work–his plan for mass redemption throughout this world–that’s incredible.

I don’t want to go on. I hate my life. I blurred those words out in the last post I wrote them in — too afraid to be honest. But I don’t care anymore. It’s true. But I look at the coming year wondering if it will be the year my ministry will succeed, and I say finding out the answer to that question makes life worth living. One day I will be a pastor. I know it. And living to see a ministry that I build actually make a difference in someone’s life — that makes life worth living.

If you want to find hope somewhere deep within all the depressed moments of this year — moments I’ve transcribed over the past few years in my 20 blog posts, let me leave you with this: I have hope and peace because I’ve found the lover whom my heart has always longed for (Song of Solomon 3:3-5). He calls me to assist him with a work that is beyond me, and that, my friend, is exactly why I live. I could have given up this year, I could have gone back to my countless suicide attempts, but I didn’t.

That may not sound like the hope you’re looking for, but I promise it’s the hope you need. We can get so caught up in the futile search for beautiful perfection, but real meaning is when you find someone worth suffering for and with; when that suffering accomplishes a greater purpose; when that suffering somehow protects you from death; when that suffering promises some form of beauty in this life and the ultimate form of immense beauty in the next. This is meaning. This is purpose. And this will forever be the reason I live.