Discovering Purpose
Every year, in January, millions of people consider their New Year’s resolutions. Once upon a time, I did that as well. Till I stopped, because anything worth committing to is worth committing to all year long and most of my ideas were short-lived and/or born out of guilt or shame.
About a decade ago, I read a book by Parker Palmer called, Let Your Life Speak. It is short and poetic in nature, yet it had a profound message for me. I was at a career crossroads, and in essence it said that I could live out my purpose no matter what my job title was. Through the years, I have had many job titles, but my purpose remains clear. I rise and I know that my job is to empower.
The problem comes when people do not know their purpose. When the alarm rings, they simply dress for a job. And repeat. “Without a vision, the people perish.” In education and in the business world, we value product, so we write our “mission statements” and our “intended outcomes”. We word-smith them to death so they can fit on our brochures and feel smooth to the ear. But a personal purpose is raw and rugged. It shapes our assent and carves our trail. We slide down in the mud of life’s circumstances, but our calling lifts our chin and reminds us to re-seek our trail and re-start our accent.
Our purpose is our hill to die on. If it is worth living for, then it goes to follow that it would be worth dying for. I’ve stopped doing New Year’s resolutions, but every January, I re-think and re-frame my purpose.
On January 15, I am reminded of what it means to live for a cause and to die for a cause. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s life began on this day and he spent 39 years being angry about injustice, yet he found a path through his anger to love. He woke up every day and lived out his purpose. He moved his family to the thick of the struggle. His house was bombed with his newborn inside of it. His brother’s house was bombed. He received regular death threats. Still, he rose to live out his purpose. “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”
His Nobel Peace Prize speech is powerful. He is less charismatic and more composed as he delivers it, but his message is a courageous one. Thank you for the honor, but peace is still not present. There is work to be done.
In the days before he was killed, he knew his life would be taken. He told his good friend, “Do not let them speak for a long time at my funeral. Do not let them mention that I won the Nobel Peace Prize. That is not important. Tell them that I tried to feed the hungry and help the poor. Tell them that I loved the best that I could.”
The night before he was shot, ML gave a speech, “I’ve seen the promised land…Remember if I die, this movement will not die. For God is with this movement….” He died three years before I was born. But his purpose gave birth to my own purpose. I am a part of this movement. The struggle is to love. The purpose is to help people rise.
The opposite of oppression is empowerment. That is the work that I do. That is my purpose and my calling. And you cannot empower if you cannot love. “So now, abide faith, hope and love. These three, but the greatest of these is love.”
In honor of ML, I renew my life’s calling each year. I tell my kids that justice has not yet been achieved. In 1619, the first slaves were purchased at Jamestown colony. In 1776, our founding fathers ignored the issue. They wrote a document of irony, expressing a nation’s freedom from the entrapments of another. Our country went on to oppress and abuse while rising as a superpower nation. Then we went on to segregate and discriminate and wonder why the underdog cannot simply rise and “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
Our history is laced with evil and horror and as a public-school teacher, I struggle in this truth. The only way to teach our horrific history is to also teach love, to also show examples of extraordinary individuals in the world, like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who found a supernatural ability to love and forgive. They rose above the sins of humanity and empowered nations—starvation, imprisonment, and death could not stop their movement.
How then can it be that their movement is connected to our own? What hill will we die on? What is our purpose? To what cause will we rise? If the opposite of oppression is empowerment and the antidote to violence is love, then how can this inform our life’s work. When our alarm clock rings each day and we dress for work, what will we say our mission is? What is our intended outcome?
Here are some video clips that inspired our class conversations this week as we worked through materials on racism. Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
ML’s Dream Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IB0i6bJIjw
A Civil Rights Activist’s Story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad2eNCZhWu8
ML’s Last Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtCoywg_96o