Questions for Your Life Part 2

 

This week we are playing with the questions of safety, security, feeling loved, wanted, joyful, good, and sense of purpose.  Yesterday, I invited you to reflect on when you felt safe and who was with you?  Or when did you encounter and experience God’s love from another?  Today, I want to expand and encourage you to describe and define what each of these words would look like, feel like, taste or smell like?  The clearer we can be with what safety means for you, the more you may uncover and discover why you may not feel safe.  For example, if security means having more in the balance of my bank account, then I might not ever feel secure.  Or if feeling good enough comes only after people offer praise for something I did, then I might be constantly seeking other’s affirmation and approval.  I want to be clear; this takes time.  Initially, I may write down that my purpose is faithfulness - to grow in the image of God for the sake of the other.  But I will need to sit with that.  How do I grow in the image of God?  When or where?  Do I grow through reading or serving or holding someone’s hand?  Also, how am I growing in new or different ways?  The reality is that by June this year, maybe faithfulness is no longer my clear-cut number one purpose, perhaps feeling loved takes center stage.  I know when I first began in ministry success was a growing church ~ more people and more pledges.  But what if success in ministry is more about growing in ways that can’t be measured with numbers?  We constantly evolve and expand and explore new places and ways.  These seven questions are threads and themes woven into the garment of life.

Perhaps today you want to dive deeper into the same question from yesterday or want to move to another one of the questions to ponder prayerfully.  In some ways returning to these questions again and again is a wonderful prayer practice for the coming year.  Each week you could ask when and where and how did you feel safe and secure?  Who embodied love and made you feel wanted/heard/valued?  When did joy pay a serendipitous visit not because you earned or deserved the visit, but because joy arrives unannounced in many ways.  This may lead to moments when we feel good and when we feel our most authentic in life.  Note that purpose is living from your true sense of God-formed and fashioned self.  Purpose does change over time.  Purpose sometimes takes vacations.  The more you play with the questions, the more they start to influence and inspire one another.  I pray you will continue to hold these questions close to your heart this week.