Social Prayers

I want to talk to you about purpose…

• Put up your hand if you went to class today.

Now I am going to ask you about your purpose in doing so.

• Put your hand down if your purpose in going to class today was mainly pure intellectual curiosity
  
• Put your hand down if you didn’t much feel like working today but nevertheless went to class with the purpose of eventually gaining academic qualifications which will allow you to be successful and have highly respected job in later life
  
• Put you hand down if you didn’t much feel like working today but went to class today with the purpose of avoiding pain given that you knew that if you didn’t go to class certain people would make your life more painful….

Fine well you may have had many other perfectly acceptable purposes in mind. Some of you I guess have an exact idea of what your purpose in life is. Perhaps your purpose is to make yourself rich, or to make your self happy or to make yourself morally upright. Perhaps you aren’t sure about your purpose. Whatever the case you have definitely done something today or at least this week without properly thinking about what your purpose in doing so was. The problem is this:- life is very busy. And the business of life combined with the complications of changing your mind about something mean that it is far more comfortable not to think about our purpose in doing things. Particularly because if we think about it we might actually make some dangerous conclusions like, this isn’t worth doing a at all.

Take this lego man for example Who here admits to having possessed, at some point in their lives, some lego? I admit not only to possessing lego but to being something of a lego geek. Anyway, today I have brought with me Dominic Duplo man. Dominic in many ways is an astounding likeness of the human form with fully moving arms legs and rotating head. In addition to the typical human functions he is able to rotate his head not 90% not 180% but a full 360% degrees and crucially it is possible to temporarily amputate his whole lower half without the slightest prejudice to his lego well being. For reasons best know to his Danish creators, In contrast to the typical humanoid he has, in the midst of all his lifelikeness, along with all his millions of contemporaries across the world a puzzlingly monochrome complexion. In many ways he is like a human and that’s what makes him so great. I can make scenes with him. Barry the lego man sitting down. Barry the lego man in dismay, barry the lego man with his trousers on back to front. Barry the lego man can perform a huge range of functions which is really great but that is not his actual point of existence, his purpose. No his purpose is indicated on any duplo box. for children aged 3 and older, not to be consumed (or something like that).
Barry the lego man’s purpose is to interact with his owner, a human. He exists for the benefit of his owner.

"What does Barry have to do with me?" you might say.

Well we can all get a little bit confused about our purpose too.

• Let’s take sport. What is the point of sport? It’s fun, when it gets tough its character building, it develops great relationships. But sometimes we can think that the whole point of sport is winning, so then if we don’t win we get so upset that the fun, the character building, the relationships go out of the window.

• Study: what is the purpose of study? To broaden your mind to enable you think constructively to inform us in our decisions to learn about. But sometimes we can think the whole point of studying is avoiding punishment, which, let’s face it is a deeply depressing outlook and will hardly encourage us.
  

But how about we think even deeper. Dominic’s purpose is not to rotate his head through 360 degrees. He is able to do that, in fact he is remarkably good at it, but his purpose is to interact with me. Why do you get out of bed in the morning, why do you do anything instead of nothing? I wonder do you have an answer. What is your purpose in life?

To finish I want to tell you a story about one man and his purpose. How many of you have seen Chariots of Fire? So you will remember Eric Lidell. Eric Lidell was a Scottish runner. He was a remarkably talented man. After playing for the Scottish rugby team for a couple of years he went to the Olympics in 1924 where he intended to run in the 100metres. Eric loved running, but not simply for its own sake. He was a Christian and for him running had meaning and purpose because he saw it not as a means of winning himself glory but of recognising the glory of his Creator. It was he who spoke the famous lines “God made me fast, and when I run I feel his good pleasure” Eric won the gold in the 400 and bronze in the 200 metres that year, but for him there was a deeper purpose to all his endeavours, and interaction with his creator. Just like Dominic infact. He was convinced that he was designed to be in a relationship with his master and creator.
I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with Eric Lidell, but I hope you have a chance to ask yourself, "what is my purpose?"