True Potential

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.