Living With a Purpose

We all ask ourselves what our purpose in life is. It is what drives us. Without a purpose, we feel lost and confused. There are many different answers to this question. My favorite answer comes from a book called The Purpose of Life by Matthew Kelly. He says that everyone has a different purpose in life. He says that God doesn’t want to force everyone be missionaries, and it is untrue that if you aren’t a celebrity, don’t create masterpieces, or change the course of history then you don’t have a purpose. He says that to find your purpose in life, you have to find what you are extremely good at. You have to find out what you are better at than anyone else. It doesn’t have to be something huge. It could be that you are the best at loving your children or your spouse, or teaching 3^rd graders. Whatever it is that you do exceptionally well, whatever it is that you do better than anyone else, that is what you should do in life. That is your purpose.

In the book Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, the main character Jasmine believes as a result of her religion and culture that everyone has an assignment in life. This one assignment is the whole purpose of life, the sole reason that each person is alive. In one part of the book, Jasmine is having a discussion with a friend named Taylor about peoples’ assignments in life. She tries to explain her belief by explaining what her father’s possible assignment in life may have been. She says that his purpose could have been to crunch one single piece of gravel (which he did right after he got off a bus one day and right before he was gored by a bull). She says that he died that day because he had finished his assignment in life. Then she says that perhaps his purpose was to die before he could marry her off so that she could fall in love with her late husband Prakash, or that she could fall in love with Prakash and upon his death move to New York and bring enlightenment on this subject to Taylor himself.

Jasmine says that anyone could have any purpose in life, including the possibility of altering another persons life. However, Taylor couldn’t believe that every life could have a single, special purpose. He says, "If rearranging a particle of dust is as important as discovering relativity, that’s a formula for total anarchy... Where’s the incentive to do anything?" (Pg. 61). She knew that the incentive was to go about life knowing that anything could be your assignment from God, and to treat every action equally important.

Since this is one of Jasmine’s core beliefs, it plays a large part in her life, and ultimately this belief alters her life. She is constantly wondering if what she is doing at an exact moment is or is not her purpose in life, or if that moment will affect her sole purpose in life. After her husband Prakash dies, she endures so much torture in order to get to America and fulfill what she thinks her assignment is. At one point, she is raped by a man who helps to smuggle her into the country. As she was in the bathroom, about to slit her own throat and "balance her defilement with death", she remembers that perhaps she had not yet finished her mission, and this thought prevented her from killing herself. Her belief that she had one certain assignment in life, and the possibility that she had not yet completed it actually saved her life, and allowed for so much more to happen in her future.

In the book it says, "The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down. When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment" (Pg. 59). While I do not believe that a person’s whole purpose in life could be something as small as crunching a single piece of gravel, I do believe that each and every one of us has a purpose in life. I think that finding our purpose and living it is what we should spend our whole life doing, because living with a purpose will allow us to live with passion, joy and peace.