I’m not sure I’m like most people, but for such a long time I felt lost. What was my purpose? What was I going to do for my life? Sure, I am an electrical engineer and working in the utility industry but what was my purpose and plan? Climb the corporate ladder? Work towards becoming a principal engineer? Both paths were pretty empty long term. Certainly, being a dad is important but what happens when my kids are adults? How about being a husband? That was probably the most promising future I had but maybe my wife would disagree?
I was lost. I didn’t have direction or purpose.
It was June of 2017 and I had just started a job at Colorado Springs Utilities. Part of our orientation was to sit through a meeting with the CEO and listen to him recite some speech about how amazing CSU was and how lucky they were to have us. You know the typical thing you’d hear from someone you’d probably never meet again, but boy I was in for a surprise. While his speech had some of that, his actual message was that of trying to find purpose in your life. He described how he got to where he was and had some of the same feelings I had. One activity he told us about though that I really liked was that he and his family put together a mission statement. I really wanted to do that with my family but we were busy and it wasn’t a priority so it never got done.
A couple years later I heard from God, he wanted me to use my engineer skills to help the world and the next 5 or so years became trying to better understand what that meant. I listened and learned what God was saying. We even took a class on being a missionary. Despite that I still never truly thought about and figured out what my purpose was. Then recently we were asked by someone if we had a mission statement and since we didn’t, we were challenged to put one together. Finally, we committed to finding the time to put this together. We sat down as a family, and all threw out words that were important to us or that described who we were or what we were to achieve. We let the kids do most of this work and then we told them we could take these words and ideas and put them into a statement.
After a meeting or two and discussing with my wife here is what we came up with:
The Hall family, an imperfect but bold family, are striving to love Jesus and make disciples in His name. We are committed to loving everyone, laughing often and remaining life-long learners.
It’s been interesting the effect this has had on me. I have a purpose now; well, I’ve always had a purpose, but I’ve put it in writing, and I understand it. See everything, I mentioned at the first part of this post should be secondary to what you’re doing for and with God. God should be our priority; we have accepted him as our Lord and Savior and now it’s our duty to share his good news. We also wanted to make sure we supported this whole statement biblically, so we found the following 6 verses which support our purpose. Genesis 12:1-3, Proverbs 19:8, Psalm 126:2, 2 Timothy 1:7, Romans 3:23 and John 13:34.
Having a purpose though has removed so much fear, doubt and discouragement in my life. When you’re rowing in the same direction as your creator, he wants to support you, love you and help you. I still have times of worry or doubt, but I know that if I follow my purpose which is what God has for me then I’ve done the absolute best that I can.