You want to be happy. You want to succeed. You want a sense of fulfillment. You want that warm fuzzy feeling that tells you everything’s okay. You’ve got an inkling that your life should somehow mean something, that there should be some purpose to your existence. You want to be happy and you want your life to count – you know that much. How to get there though, you’re not so sure.
When it comes to happiness, success, fulfillment and purpose, it seems like there’s a guru around every corner and on every TV infomercial; ready to show us how we can be more successful, better looking, happier, healthier and richer in as little as five minutes a day – without leaving home. We’ve listened to the spiel, we’ve bought the products and we’ve tried their fool-proof paths to success, happiness, and whiter teeth. We followed the instructions and walked the walk. In the end, we find ourselves about where we started; a little older and a little poorer, but no happier, no more fulfilled.
Even God’s spokesmen are getting in on the success and happiness biz. Whether they promise that you’ll discover your "purpose in forty days" or experience
"your best life now", the message is pretty much the same as the guys in the infomercials, but with a religious twist; “Find meaning, get rich and make God
happy at the same time!”
So why another happiness/meaning/fulfillment/purpose program? Haven’t we had enough? I agree, adding one more twist to the same old agenda isn’t going to do
any of us any good. But what if this message is different? What if it’s about living up to our real potential? Our real purpose?
We’ve all got potential. The self-help gurus have educated us plenty on that. They claim that we have the potential to be or do anything we want. And to a
point they’re right – we do have a lot of potential. But potential to be what? Rich? Famous? Happy? Loved?
The truth is, you’ve got the potential to do or be almost anything you want. But how do you know what you want? In the long run, what is it that will bring
you true fulfillment? What possible purpose could you serve that would mean more than anything else? Is there such a thing as your highest purpose? Something
you were born to do? Is there one thing, one purpose for you to accomplish that would mean more in your life and in eternity than any other possible alternative?
That’s what True Potential is all about; discovering what you were born to do; your highest purpose. The good news is that you were born with the purpose and
the potential to accomplish it pre-installed. It was planned for you and you alone, a long, long time before your parents ever conceived you. And it was
deposited into your life at birth, like DNA; just as much a part of you as the color of your eyes and as individual as your fingerprints. You already possess
your true potential. It’s just waiting on you to do something about it.
Your happiness, meaning and fulfillment in this life, and in the next, are wrapped up in accomplishing the purpose for which you exist. You are here for a
very real and very personal reason. If you believe that this universe and everything in it (that includes you) is the product and design of a purposeful and
personal Creator, then you must also believe that He has a purpose for your existence. This unique purpose, according to the Bible, was in the mind of God
long before you or I ever existed.
That’s what True Potential is all about. Each week we will explore just what our true potential is and how we go about realizing it. We will also discuss
what doesn’t work; the things we’ve tried and that have failed us. You may just discover that success, happiness, and fulfillment may be something entirely
different, something much more profound than what the gurus and experts have been telling us.
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Stuff
We’ve tried consuming our way to happiness. The more stuff we get, the happier we’ll be right? We’ve turned consumption into a way of life. It’s our national
pastime and we all participate. The people who sell stuff need to sell more stuff. They convince the people who buy stuff that they need to own more stuff.
We’re convinced that the next widget or the next upgrade will finally satisfy us, and the sellers stay in business by convincing us that we deserve to be
satisfied.
We’ve consumed ourselves into back-breaking debt. America’s National Debt now stands at over eight trillion, eight-hundred and seventy-four billion dollars; that’s $29,349.97 per person – man, woman and child. We’re up to our eyeballs in bills and we’re so broke we buy the kids’ Happy Meals with a Visa card. Our garages are so filled with stuff that we can’t park a bicycle in them, let alone our two financed cars sitting in our mortgaged driveway. All this stuff, all this debt and the only solution we can come up with is to shop for a bigger garage. We just can’t get enough stuff.
Crushing debt isn’t the only thing that’s killing us. Physically, we’re consuming ourselves into an early grave. Two modern plagues we’ve brought upon ourselves through our own affluence are chronic stress and obesity. Consumption diseases.
Chronic stress rules our lives. We’ve got to keep up, to keep buying, to keep consuming, to have more than the next guy…and there’s always a next guy.
Whatever upgrade we just got, whether it’s leather trimmed upholstery for the car, an upscale kitchen for the house, a classier neighborhood for the kids, or super-size fries for lunch, there’s an even better, even bigger choice just ahead. It costs a little more than the last upgrade, but all we need to do is
stretch just a little further….
All that stretching for just a little more stresses us to the point of mental and physical breakdown. As a society, as a family, as individuals we’ve stretched and stressed more than we can handle. We’re at the end of our collective rope; we’ve tied a knot and we’re hanging on…barely. And there’s no end in sight.
Heart disease, high blood pressure, insomnia, ulcers, chronic fatigue, migraines and the list goes on…all stress related diseases. Of course, our never ending quest for stuff doesn’t just create an epidemic of stress related diseases; it creates a whole new industry of cures. Watched TV lately? Then you know that we’ve created a pharmaceutical solution for every symptom we’ve brought upon ourselves. Just what the doctor ordered…more stuff.
America’s number one health problem isn’t AIDS, it isn’t bird flu, it’s not even germs from public places; it’s obesity. The Centers for Disease Control reports that fully one third of our nation is obese; and the trend is moving upward. We’ve consumed so much it’s killing us. Which is a little ironic, since America is also the world’s number one consumer of diet and health products.
And, surprise, surprise…the medical industry has now positively linked stress to obesity. It seems that all this fret over getting more than the next guy or more than we have now is causing us to blow up like Violet Beauregard in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
The problem is, after we’ve stuffed and stuffed until we can’t stuff no more, we discover, that having stuff and consuming stuff hasn’t satisfied us. At the end of the day all of our stuff hasn’t made us happy. We’re full but we’re not fulfilled.
So what do we do? Renounce all worldly stuff, move to a cave and eat twigs and roots? If having stuff doesn’t fulfill us, will not having stuff do the trick?
Will a life of self-imposed poverty and ascetic self-denial lead us to true happiness? Before you give away all your stuff, let me let you in on something…that doesn’t work either.
Here’s a little aphorism my father laid on me when I was a teenager: “Son, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and believe me, rich is better.” Dad was a minister and his life was more invested in eternal riches than worldly wealth. But what I think he meant is that even though the Bible promises that the poor will be blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven, it doesn’t guarantee that their lot in this life will be all that comfortable. I don’t believe there is any special righteousness in being poor, anymore than there is any transcendent honor in being rich.
The Bible does say, however, that where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is also. It also warns us against laying up earthly treasures at the expense of eternal treasure.
Here’s the bottom line: We’re not on this earth for a very long time. Our mission here is not to consume and collect stuff until we die. We have something much more important to do here than become the winner of some cosmic hotdog eating contest. There’s nothing wrong with stuff, if we understand who really owns it and it doesn’t clutter the path of our real mission in life.
Stuff may make us comfortable and may make our life easier, but it’s no substitute for purpose. If you’ve made collecting and consuming stuff your purpose in life; if your highest goal is the next upgrade, then you’ve sold yourself way short. Your reason for existence is so much more important than what you own or what your drive or what you eat.
The Creator of the universe was actually thinking about you when He spoke all of this into existence. He had a specific reason for you to exist on earth at this particular moment in time. He’s got a job for you to do… just you. Pretty remarkable isn’t it? That the Creator of the universe has something He wants you to do? I can’t believe that collecting stuff is what He had in mind for your mission in life. There’s something much more spectacular planned for you. Something that’s been planned for a long, long time.
That’s what True Potential is all about. Your true potential has already been planted inside you. It’s been waiting for you to come along since way before you were ever conceived. It’s been waiting since the universe was conceived in the mind of the Creator. That potential, that plan, that purpose, that task was in the mind of the Creator, specifically for you, back at the beginning of this whole shebang. Anything less than pursuing that first purpose in your life would be a tragedy. You were born for this. Let’s get to it!
