Alive - by Dave Smith

Neither – Emmons had hit the wrong target. He instantly dropped
from first place to eighth, from the gold medal to no medal.
This is a very poignant picture of what it’s like we when miss our
true purpose in life. We may be skilled in a particular area and feel
like we’re hitting the bullseye, but fail to ask the more important
question: are we aiming at the right target? 3
Part of the problem is that we can look for a sense of purpose in
the wrong place, which will invariably give us an inaccurate view of
who we truly are, and who we’re called to be.
There are two ‘wrong’ places to look. The first is by looking entirely
‘within ourselves’. Now a qualifier here – as we shall see later in the
chapter, there’s much that we can learn about our life purpose by
understanding ourselves better. Each one of us is a unique
combination of our gifts, passions, abilities, personality and life
experiences. The problem is that we’re flawed! The early Church
father, Saint Augustine, someone who pursued a wrong life purpose
for many years, described our natural human condition as being
‘Incurvatus In Se’ which is Latin for ‘curved in oneself’. In other words,
if we purely focus on discovering our purpose from within, and don’t
find a solution to our egocentricity, we will inevitably end up with a
misguided sense of purpose that will ultimately not fulfil us or help
those around us.
The second wrong source that we can be tempted to look to is
other people. Again, this is not all bad: we’re hard-wired from infancy
to ‘learn from others’. In fact, being inspired by good role models
from a distance, and being mentored by wise leaders close-up, is
necessary and essential to us finding and fulfilling our unique pathway.
The problem, though, as with looking within, is that all human beings
are imperfect. Hence, if we follow others too closely, we can end up