I Want More Purpose in the Everyday
Have you ever been in a place spiritually where you feel a little unsure about what you’re doing with your life? Where you begin to wonder: Is this really what God’s purpose is for my life?
I know I have.
In fact, I was recently feeling just that—a little bored and restless about the day-to-day of my life. There was nothing outright bad about it but I just felt kind of, well, meh. My interactions with people and work and even my time in prayer felt a little bland and uninspired. And I was feeling a bit unsure of God’s purpose in all of it.
Thankfully, my spiritual director was able to remind me that much of the Christian life—and much of God’s purpose for our lives—is walking humbly with the Lord through days that are simply okay. It’s running errands with a spirit of quiet joy. It’s completing our workday tasks with patience and discipline.
It’s making space in our hearts to trust that God is always walking with us and helping us no matter how mundane it seems at times.
God’s purpose for our lives certainly has those mountain-top moments—those times when we feel His comfort and love and excitement about our callings. But there are a lot of days in between those when God’s purpose for us is to live out or ordinary days with love, patience, and trust.
In fact, our unique purpose and meaning are often wrapped up in our 9-5 jobs, our friends, the city we live in, and our family. We all play a role in our communities to be the hands and feet of God. To love others, to hold them accountable, to pray for them… This is how God may be working in their lives: through us.
It was a reminder I certainly needed at the time, though I think there are things we can do to help keep this truth front and centre in our lives.
For one, I have found it helpful to develop a posture of interior silence so that I can hear God’s voice regularly. What does that mean? It is a particular form of prayer that can help us make sense of our conflicting emotions, desires, yearnings, fears, and so on. It entails sitting quietly and focusing on God’s love for us. Just sitting and allowing the Lord to be present to us and love us.
I sometimes will repeat the name Jesus in my mind as a way to draw my often roaming thoughts back to the Lord. It allows me to hear God’s still, inner voice that reminds me I am infinitely loved and am called to respond to this truth with joy and love. From this place of quiet, I may realize a thought or desire keeps bubbling up, and that this might be the Lord. Or that, once my mind is calmed, I can better give my problems over to the Lord without fear or anxiety. With this type of prayer, we can learn to sense the Lord in our hearts and the peace that only He can bring.
St. Ignatius of Loyola developed a series of exercises for doing just this, which he called the discernment of spirits. And while these can be helpful in making bigger life decisions—they can also help us better see God’s purpose for us in the little things in our lives. We can learn to offer up our desires and thoughts, our boredom and confusions, allowing God to help us make sense of them. The more we engage in this type of prayer, the more we can see God working in the “everyday” of our lives.
In other words, we can see that a warm exchange between a coworker was God offering His consoling presence to us. We can realize we might be called to grow in humility when it comes to being around certain people who frustrate us. We can see that we may be giving into technology to distract us from our fear as opposed to turning it over to Christ. And we can be aware of God’s purposes in the numerous things and people that make up our ordinary days.
We can also make room to discover God’s purpose for our daily lives by looking around us with love and compassion. God’s purpose for all of us is fundamentally the same each day: to grow in love of Him and others.
This means our daily purpose always entails serving others. And we do this best by being immersed in the lives of others.
By being involved in the world, we can see where some people in our life are hungry for God, and how we might be called to bring them Christ to satisfy that hunger.
This has no doubt been true for me. It is my spiritual director who helped me see that God was asking me to grow in humility and faith during those days of feeling restless and uninspired. It is my faith community that helps me remember how each day is an opportunity to serve and love others—even in the smallest of ways—through their own example and witness. It is my relationship with my family that reminds me of how precious each moment is spent with the people who love us.
It is truly in the mundane or the ordinary, or whatever you may categorize it as, that God really unravels the deep, meaningful, purpose. St. Therese of Lisieux dreamed of being a missionary. But she realized that she was not being called to love those in distant lands—as great as that purpose seemed to her—but that her God-given purpose was to love, with small acts of kindness and humility, the sisters in her very own community daily. I think her example is a great reminder for us: God’s purpose for our lives, more often than not, can be found in the smallest and simplest details that make up each day.
So what’s your purpose? Why do you think God has you in the work, relationships, and city that you are in right now?
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