Reflections on LifeSample

I remember our CEO Neels giving a devotional about this passage a couple of years ago. He talked about the power of purpose and appointment, and how many youths feel directionless and suicidal because they see no greater reason for their lives. However, God has a plan for all of us, as he did with Jeremiah, the youth God is speaking to here.

I was feeling without purpose at the time, and a few days beforehand I had written in my diary that I was ‘a lone satellite, still faithfully in orbit, but forgotten by my God’.

But I was not forgotten. Sitting in that stuffy room one Thursday morning, the passage from Jeremiah seemed to literally glow off the page of my Bible. How could black text glow? Was this what people meant by ‘The Living Word’? In fact, I was so fascinated by this phenomenon, that during the rest of the day I would quickly open my Bible to see if the sheen still existed! The closest visual equivalent I can give you is called ‘chromatic aberration’, where light is dispersed, and a rainbow effect is created around even black. That’s what it looked like. Incredible.

Since then, my life has taken on new meaning, every moment gaining a prophetic edge as I looked past the surface of things. I hadn’t been forgotten. I had been rejecting His call, as Jonah did, curled up and depressed in the depths of a ship to Somewhere Else. This realisation of purpose cut through the soupiness of my secularised world. Nihilism is trendy. Conviction is not.

This is obviously an important verse for me personally, but it carries a potent message for everyone. Jeremiah was called to: “be a prophet to the nations”, yes, an extreme role, but the first part of the passage applies to us all:

‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart’ (Jer 1:5 NIV).

Each person has been made with a purpose. Like any good father, God wants the best for his children, and has ambitions for us. They may be complex and multifaceted, but still loaded with loving intentionality. No one, absolutely no one, is a mistake.