Live Your Truest Joy of Human Life

Since last week, the media has been drowning us in new year's resolution stories about weight loss, going back to school and making other major life changes. I just watched a commercial for chosing a career in truck driving or medical transcription, and said, "That's it! I must speak up."
Finding our life design or purpose is not about randomly selecting a job because it pays well or is near your home. Such decision making would be like eating everything on the menu until you find what you life.

I remember meeting a college freshman from Hawaii in 1974. She was painfully homesick at Adrian College, sitting in the cornfields of southeast Michigan.
"How did you choose this school? You can't afford to go home even once a year!" I asked.

"It was the first college listed in the big book," she said through her tears.

No, such random acts of blindness are unwise and dangerous. Pity the poor children who are being taught by a teacher who really doesn't like children. I endured more than one year in such a classroom.

While bike riding yesterday, I watched birds dancing along a lakeside, spending the afternoon hunting for food. How at ease and comfortable they looked in their beautiful habitat. They know what their life is about, I thought.

My late grandparents, Floretta Elmore Greeley and Dr. Hugh Payne Greeley, learned early that their lives were about service to others. In their book about living in Newfoundland, Work and Play in the Grenfell Mission, they detail traveling upwards of 25 miles on snowshoes to treat typhoid or tend to a sick newborn. What joy comes through in their stories! Recommending this newly married couple for this remote outpost assignment in 1911, Dr. Wilfred Grenfell wrote, "I do pray your generous gift of time and labor may repay you amply. It is at least giving you another taste of the truest joy of human life; that, in my estimation, is its true dignity and justification: that we put something into life to help others, which I believe is the true and only real expression of our faith in our sonship of God."

Whether we see our service as an expression of faith or an expression of love, the key is living our "truest joy of human life!"