Do You Know Your Purpose in Life? Most Don't Know This.

Life throws both good and bad at us. Every day may bring us into confrontation with a problem that seems to have no solution, or place us in a situation that plays on our fear of taking action. Yet, obsession about the negative things in our life is like a shovel that digs us inch by inch into a deeper hole. Soon we are in over our heads, and the pit becomes so deep we cannot see the light of day. Fumbling in the dark, we can hardly find the means to climb out of this ditch. But the answer is always there, inside us. Within everyone is the power to lift themselves up into the light. What, then, is the springboard out of the darkness? The answer is purpose.

As a kid, I spent many years in foster care and felt like I had no purpose in life. What my childhood decision really came down to is that I decided then and there that I must have purpose. Purpose would drive me to overcome the troubles I immediately faced, and the many challenges I sensed were on the horizon. Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, came to believe that when there is no immediate hope of deliverance, and it seems like there is nothing to live for and no reason to go on, having purpose in one’s life is the thing that keeps us going.

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, and during the years he spent in a Nazi concentration camp, he took note of who survived the ordeal and why. He concluded that the most important thing separating survivors from those who gave in was that each of those who lived had some reason to keep on living. A project they had always wanted to finish, an aspiration that had been denied them since they’d been imprisoned.

Sometimes those who were by all accounts physically weaker survived, simply because there was something in their lives that was left unfinished. Meaning is like a carrot on a stick, dangling in front of us, prodding us to keep going. But unlike the ox that forever chases the carrot, the more effort we exert the closer we come to grasping whatever it is we’re chasing. One day, the meaning we seek will be in our very hands. - Derek Clark