Purpose is more important than Comfort

The recent psychological science attests to the fact that stress is not always bad for us, and indeed it can be the key motivational factor that helps us perform.  This is good news because we all live at least moderately stressful lives, and stress is not something we can control as it’s usually very much, as an input, about external factors.

The point is this: we can achieve in our thinking an emphasis of stress empowering us rather than stress damaging us.  It isn’t ‘positive psychology’ because the science is proven.

We turn stress into motivation
when we convert fear into courage.

It all depends on whether we think stress is harmful for us or whether we think stress could help us if only it’s harnessed, it’s as simple as that.  If we think our stress is harmful, that stress tends to have a toxic effect on our health and vitality.  But if we can work with our stress and use it to drive our motivation, we facilitate oxytocin release for our benefit, moderating our body’s cortisol release.  Our bodies are designed to respond well.

Where this gets positively biblical is when we start to read verses like James 1:2-4, which begins with, “Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds...”  The trouble is, such a thought is so foreign to us that we can scratch our heads and ask ourselves what on earth was James talking about.  “Joy”? ... in “trials of many kinds”?

I see myself in this just as much as you possibly do.  And I think the biggest issue we have these days is we’ve become so used to comfort.  Yet if we were to do some special forces training, we would soon learn to adapt to the stress—we would need to just to survive.  Fortunately, very few of us will ever be subjected to the ignominy of that kind of environment.

Talking negatively about comfort in these ways isn’t really where I want to land this article.

It’s only half the story.

The other half of the story is what puts the dispatch of our comfort into its proper perspective.  Literally nothing else matters in our lives other than meaning and purpose.

If we are connected to a meaning that is intrinsically us, to a purpose that gets us out of bed and motivated to do our best each and every day, we have all we need to live.  We are sustained by that which comes from within ourselves, and there’s really little anyone can do to extinguish our flame, so long as we are in touch with that pilot light deep inside us.

Sure, many of us must rally against the tyranny of trauma, learn how to contend with our triggers, harnessing the empowering aspects of our bodies, and learn to believe again in what we CAN do as opposed to being disabled by what we can’t do.  Our lives aren’t ruined.  It’s only a story, a narrative, that we say to ourselves, that we’re conditioned to believe, that we allow to go unchecked, that we give permission by default to direct our lives.  Negative narratives will run our lives if we let them.

What we can do to contend with this disempowering default is be reminded that we are alive for such a time as this.  We have ONE life.  This one.  The one we’re living.  And anyone subscribing to the Christian life knows there’s an enemy that just wants to incessantly crush every human being, and there’s a much larger price on the head of anyone who lives for God, who is an insurgent of grace against this enemy’s design of subjugation.

Our purpose and the meaning of our lives is urgent.  It ought to get us up each day with a drive to live.  And I understand those in today’s predicament who can’t because I’ve been there.  I’ve been to depression, to grief, to hell... and back.  When we’re battling for the will to live, we must have faith that the trials we face have their purpose in our overall purpose.

My experience is that God wastes none of our suffering.  It’s not just a cliché.  It just takes a few years, or at most a decade or two, consider David or Joseph.  I think it took about 13 years and 17 years respectively.  But it was their purpose.  Their comfort wasn’t their goal, their purpose was.

It’s worth continuing in our purpose rather than be discouraged by our lack of comfort because the years grind on toward the goal anyway.  Going the way of comfort won’t achieve for us our purpose, meaning, or goals.  Those years of comfort arrive just as much as our purposeful end does.  Do we want a satisfied contentedness for achieving our purpose or pungent regret for the ‘achievement’ of our comfort?  Again, we have ONE life.

A focus on our comfort will lead to overwhelm,
a focus on our purpose leads to overcoming.

More important than our comfort is our purpose and the meaning beyond our comfort.  This is not to say that we don’t need safety, because we do.  Our safety is needed to live our purpose.  But living our purpose affords a way of sanctuary and part of our purpose is to continue to find that way.

No matter what is happening in your life right now, no matter how hard it may be, don’t forget to sniff the flowers and look up at that blue or grey or black sky.  The earth and life are the same every day, and your purpose is here.