What Is My Purpose Now? The Pearl of Great Price

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field,
which a person finds and hides again.

During the year, at our Men’s Group,
we have been reading a book called
“The Power of Purpose” by Richard Leider,
and in it he tries to articulate
what it is that gives us meaning and purpose in our life.
He takes a very similar tack to Viktor Frankl
in “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
But in this book in particular, he says
that once we find this purpose,
in relation to the world’s needs,
and that it is a dynamic process.
I think that insight is very powerful.
It is a process that we come to,
and we know when we get there.
We have this aha moment.

It is kind of like for many of you
when you met your spouse.
You had this aha moment,
and that was the meaning of your life.
From that moment on you had a purpose.
Then you had children,
and that became more purposeful.
This process continues,
when we get our first job,
or what degree we choose in college.
It is not a once-in-a-lifetime thing,
but there is this constant process of purpose
at particular times in our life.
I think that is very powerful.

It is the very theme we hear in today’s gospel.
From the Gospel of Matthew,
we hear three powerful parables
about finding the buried treasure in the field,
the pearl of great price,
and the sorting of the good from the not-so-good catch.

They are all about the same thing:
there is this dynamic process
of searching for something,
and once we discover it,
we live all in for that moment.

That, I think, is the call God has for all of us.
Of course, the meaning of all our life
is to serve Christ
and to be Christ’s presence in the world.
But that changes ever so differently
over our lifetime,
slightly different in each era of our life.
And that requires, as the gospel does,
this deep searching,
searching for the goodness of God,
this pearl of great price.

So today I encourage you
to spend some time thinking about
this particular time in your life.
What is God calling you to?
What is the meaning for your life today,
the purpose?

It does not have to be a lifelong one,
it is for this particular epoch of your life,
this particular era,
this particular time.
And in this time, God will continue to minister to us.
But we need to search for that pearl of great price.

When he finds a pearl of great price,
he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.