Made for MoreSample

Discovering what we are made for is the purpose of life, is it not? Well, maybe it’s not so much what as it is who we are made for. 

Most of us are on the hunt for it – who we are made to be? We might even come to college for it, seek a particular job for it, want to date a particular someone for it or even follow certain people on Instagram to imitate and figure out how to discover it. 

We can often feel like our ultimate goal is to figure out what we were made for. Yet all of us can seek our purpose in things that are different. Some of us seek it in a vocation, a relationship or monetary achievement. Yet, what makes the struggle of this search so universally understood is that this very focus tends to miss a crucial component of our purpose in this life: discovering who we were made for. 

We view it as a destination, where we somehow suddenly have arrived.

We were never meant to find our own purpose on this earth. Rather, our purpose is to recognize we are made in the image of God to reflect his love and work toward his purpose. Why is it so crucial that we identify that we were made in God's image? Recognizing that we were created in God's image enables us to allow God to manifest himself in and through us entirely. Seeking our purpose on our own is trying to discover what we were made for in and through us, which misses the fact that our purpose is in Christ. 

N.T. Wright once said, "It seems to me that God has put humans like an angled mirror in His world so that God can reflect His love and care and stewardship of the world through humans and so that the rest of the world can praise the creator through humans." When referring to the image of God, Wright also says, "this is our vocation," to embody and reflect God's love in our life.

For some of us, it may be disappointing to discover the vast mystery of our purpose lies not in us, but in God. (Of course, who of us ever wants to admit emulating God's love feels remotely insufficient?) This doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have incredible plans in store for us, because he does! But it is through understanding that his love, power, and Spirit can be fully activated within the passions and dreams ahead of us, that these things can be accomplished. The moment our purpose is found in what we can achieve is the moment we’ve missed the point. 

When we have experienced the deep, unwavering, and unconditional love of Jesus Christ, we will then see there is nothing that can surpass our purpose to be image-bearers of God.