On Creating Goals -- Let the Creator Be Your Goal

Man needs more than meaning, contrary to what Logo-therapist Dr. Viktor Frankl once alleged.

Man needs life, and that more abundantly. Man is dead in his tresspasses, in need of more than a jolt or the buzz that comes with achieving a goal.

Man needs a power, the Power, that powers him from day to day through all things.

He needs to know that who he is, the values that he holds for someone else, will not change no matter what he does or does not do. That we are human beings still escapes the vast majority of people, who insist on doing what they can to achieve any sense and worth in this world.

Creating goals as an out-pouring of the life within usm nothing could be better. Creating goals in order to make or to find who we are, to establish the stability taht we so desperately need in this world, no endeavor could be more fool-hardy and frustrating.

I used to be flabber-gasted by the question that many students, that some adults had asked me:

"What is your mission? What is your calling in life?"

That kind of static idealism is quite pervasive among youth in public schools. Not that there is anything wrong with a child  wanting to be a teacher, a fire-fighter, or a police officer. Sadly, the bland and ideal cut-outs or posters which line the walls of elementary school classrooms plasticize the deeper, and sometimes more painful reality that life as based in the tragic and imperfect cannot give the warmth and security of "being in the world."

Still, there is no reason to disparage a young person for wanting to make something of himself in the world, provide that he is more than the "something" that he has made.

One intrepid mountaineer scaled Mount Everest -- oxygen tank and all, braving the piercing cold. Yet at the summit of the tallest land mass on the planet, looking into the frozen, barren sky, he asked himself the same question that men of might and means ponder: "Is this all that there is?"

Others with a more despairing tinge will cry out: "Why didn't anyone tell me that there was nothing at the top?" For the powerful mountain climber, he discovered the atmospheric nothing mirrored quite expansively the same depth within him that still called out for something deeper still, much deeper than the entire world could take it.

"Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me." (Psalm42: 7)

Yet these waterfalls, they same abstract, ideal, unreal. How do we get this water?

"Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again:

"But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." (John 4: 13-14)

This water is the Life of our Savior, accorded to us by the Present Power of the Holy Spirit:

"He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

"(But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)" (John 7: 38-39)

This life, running over and out and all about, this is what man seeks, this is what man craves. This is the Kingdom, the rule of the King of Kings in our lives:

"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. " (Matthew 6: 33)

"Desire" is the better word rather than "seek", for the Kingdom of God was at hand the moment that Jesus was walking on the earth healing and going about doing good (Acts 10: 38)

This kingdom our Good Father in Heaven freely gives:

 Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." (Luke 12: 32)

How, then is the Kingdom of God manifested to us? By the Holy Spirit:

"For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." (Romans 14: 17)

This Holy Spirit is as easy as believing in your heart and confessing out of your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord (Romans 10: 9)

Believers do not have to create their own goals in order to have life and that more abundantly (John 10: 10). This life is given to us through the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit of God guides us into all truth (John 16: 13).

Because God then works in the believer to will and do for His good pleasure, the man and woman in the Body of Christ does not have tailor little manmade goals, for God grants to us beyond what we can ask or think (Ephesians 3: 20).

Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart (Colossians 3: 15), let the Creator be your goal, and the Way, the Truth, and the Life will lead you in the way to go and the "what" that He has called you to do!