I’m just not sure. I’ve tried to come up with the right
answer, but I’m just not sure. How do you know? And what do you do once you
know?
I was a little annoyed this evening. A Facebook page that I
follow had a few posts on it recently that not only lumped all Christians into
one basket but then proceeded to insult them with some nasty terms. This is a
group of people who I respect and consider my comrades, some of the only people
truly able to appreciate what it means when I say I had a long day at work; so
this was hard to take.
The rest of the evening got me to pondering. It started with
why am I associating with people who openly insult parts of my life and
finished with me questioning what am I doing with my life. There is a line in a
song that has influenced me – “don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you
want to do with your life.” The most interesting people I know didn’t know at
22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40
year olds still don’t.
Now this is a strange way to look at life, but it has often
been said that I’m strange. But I get antsy. My editor Matt and I were talking
earlier tonight and he asked me if I knew what my calling was. I responded that
I knew the area code. We are often cheeky, but it occurred to me that there was
a large element of truth in what I had said. I know the general area that I
want my life to be in, tech, but I also want to incorporate my faith into my
calling. This poses a problem. I’m often not very personable; in fact I can be
quite blunt and this doesn’t work well with people who give you money, but it does work well in tech. Unfortunately,
if I were to pursue most of the ideas I have, I would require at least some
initial funding from some people.
So why am I telling you this? Well don’t think it’s because
I have the answers. This is a question that I have been dealing with for a long
time and I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. I think that the reason
that I’m writing this is three-fold. Tonight, for the first time in a long time,
I faced some harsh realities about what keeping the Christian faith currently
means and will continue to mean in the coming years. It seems that the persecution
of Christians has begun in NZ. For the time being it is light and can be easily
brushed off, but I believe that worse is coming. Now I don’t expect you to
believe me on this point, but just keep this in mind over the next few years.
Secondly that a purpose in life is a hard thing to pin down.
I have recently been playing a game called Adventure Capitalist. It’s a free
game on steam or the app markets and it’s kind of fun. One of the things that I
got from it however is the utter futility that many people base their lives
around. Make money in order to make more money in order to make more. Where
does this lead? To what end must one make more money? What is the end of that?
I am sure that this is not my motivation, and it may be why I have had trouble
pinning down a job. But it also makes it difficult for me to understand what
other people see in it. I applaud those who know what they wish to do with
their lives, but I find that even though I know the area of where I want to
work and spend my working life, the details are difficult.
Thirdly, I believe that one should have a purpose for life, because
let me assure you, spending a night pondering such things is not a great deal
of fun. But that having been said, my reason for writing this particular post
is (partly at least) to tell you that it’s OK not to have figured out this
stuff – I mean, I know my weirdness abounds, but I think that most people
probably have a night or two like this every once in a blue moon. And I think
that’s OK; I’m not sure how many more nights I will have like this; I know it
will be a few and that’s OK for me. But what I want is something that I can
grab on to with both hands and run. Perhaps my time is yet to come and perhaps
I will be one of the most interesting 40 year olds. Perhaps it’s because my
wife and I don’t have kids and I don’t really have to support anyone yet and
perhaps none of these things are the case. But I hope that this post grants you
some ease or piece of mind on your nights like this.
I’m not sure how to end this post. I have no real
conclusions. Writing this down didn’t do what I thought it would for me. I had
hoped it would give me some inspiration, but alas. Perhaps I just need to take
a risk, step out into the big unknown and spend some money to make, well not
money, a lifestyle? A job? Perhaps just a way to help people. I’m not great at
what I do. I’m not awful, but I feel like I can use what I can do to make a
difference, and perhaps that will be enough?
Like I said at the top, I don’t have the answers on this one;
I’m just trying to put some order to my thoughts. I hope it’s helped you at
least. But tonight I’m just going to keep thinking. I’ll let you know how it
turns out.
