I grew up feeling incomplete, always trying to pretend to be better than everyone else to cover up feeling less than everyone else. I was desperate to be loved and assured I was worthy. I felt lonely out of relationships, so I found people to cling to to make me feel okay about myself. No healthy relationship can withstand that sort of pressure.
When I am using a relationship to anesthetize me or provide my identity, I am medicating my own inadequacies and clouding my deepest passions. To that degree, I remain comfortable and therefore I will not consistently pursue the life-sustaining endeavors I need in order to feel whole and fulfilled.
If my significant relationship wasn’t filling up the part of me I’m supposed to fill myself, then my spiritual emptiness and natural curiosity for something more would propel me to find the things that can help me attain lasting contentment. I would be more willing to discover what makes me feel alive, what challenges me from the inside out and what gives me reason to wake up every day—If I wasn't so comfortable.
External stimulus will never satisfy our inner spiritual needs, at least not indefinitely.
We will always come up short, right back to square one where we are restless, discontented and unsure of our purpose, clueless as to what we're really here for.
When we are outside of our purpose, we are going to be plagued with the sense of never enough-ness.
Each of us has been given a unique set of gifts to share with the world and as we do that, we ourselves experience the benefit of making a worthwhile contribution to our sphere of influence. We experience the unparalleled feeling of significance.
Significance is one of the most important qualities we can pursue. A life without a sense of significance is one big void. It’s mere survival. It’s barely getting through the days where everything feels monotonous.
A daily sense of dread or ambivalence, indifference, is a clue that we’ve lost ourselves and are outside our realm of intended significance.
Rarely do we figure out what will lead us to a sense of significance without taking some risks. Thankfully we have an inner compass that will guide us every step of the way.
Two things are important. We must be willing to look foolish and do things everyone else who’s playing it safe would never do. We also have to be willing to regularly get quiet so that we can hear our inner compass.
Our inner voice (and God’s voice for those who believe) can be a whisper or a shout but if we are frequently drowning it out with distraction, busyness, workaholism, substances or relationships or any other types of noise, we will miss the guidance inside us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in every one of us.
The people who look forward to each new day are the people who take the time to find their internal compass, listen to it and take action. We can all find ways to increase our sense of significance and purposeful living. The question is, how bad do we want it and how willing are we to do something different to achieve it?
Dare to be all of you, not just a neat and tidy fraction of who you could be.
A life that’s lived on purpose will fly by and we will wish for more time. A life that’s lived in survival mode will drag by and we will pray for season after season to hurry up and end so we can get to something better—only to start another season that isn’t any more fulfilling than the last one.
When we uncover who we really are, what we need to do is no longer a mystery. Life problems don’t automatically go away but at least we will have found our reasons to live and our gratitude for each new sunrise comes more easily.
