Discovering Purpose

What is my purpose?

I don’t know how you feel about it, but that’s one tough question to answer.

Purpose is defined as the reason for which something is done, created, or why something exists.

 

So, to rephrase – why do I exist?

As a Christian, I’ve read my Bible, I’ve watched Facing the Giants, I know the right answer. My purpose -our purpose - is to honor God. We exist to bring glory to His Name.

But how do we do that?

Years ago, a dear woman in a Sunday school class I attended as a new Christian answered the question in this way, “We bring honor to God by trying to remain sinless every day.”  Well, that sounded like a great answer!

…until I got in the car to ride home - with my husband behind the wheel and four young children in the backseat.  Sinlessness went right out the passenger-side window, along with my patience, kindness and self-control. Did my purpose go with it too? 

No. But I didn’t know that then. I spent years and years searching for purpose in my life, searching for a way to bring my Father glory, searching for a good response to the “Why am I here?!” dilemma.

Now as a slightly more mature, but not quite ripe Christian, I have a better understanding of purpose and of bringing honor to God through realizing my purpose.

God is, and always will be, the Creator. He forms our physical being, molds our character, carves out unique areas of strengths, and uses dazzling splashes and whorls of vivid color to paint the valleys, peaks, highlights and shadows of our personalities. Each one of us is a work of art created by the Master.  He saw me, He saw you, and called us good. He delights in how He made us. 

Our unique purpose is found in the artistic details. When He created me, He created a woman who is passionate about food, who loves the written word, who likes to laugh and tease, but is most comfortable deep inside her head playing with sentences and images and solving life’s problems.  Woven within my tapestry is creativity, curiosity, hospitality, responsibility and a pressing need to relate to the people around me.

These are all very purposefully planned elements God used in His creation of me. Now my purpose is to use each of these gifts according to their purpose - I cook, I plant vegetable gardens, I feed people, I plan parties, I write blogs and stories and poems -  giving thanks to God and bringing honor to His name.

I look at it this way – my husband’s grandmother made us an intricate patchwork quilt for our wedding. She

poured a lot of love, thought and energy into its creation. I had a choice to make; I could store it, or I could use it.

If I didn’t use its size to drape a bed, or its warmth to cover a shivering body, or its beauty to grace a barren wall, what would be its purpose? It wouldn’t be functioning as a quilt. People couldn’t appreciate its warmth or admire its beauty. I would never be able to thank someone for complementing the quilt and then say, “Rob’s grandma made this for us. Isn’t she an amazing artist? Isn’t she generous with her time and talents? Isn’t she so loving to have given us this beautiful gift?”  Her attributes would go unnoticed by the people in my life, buried in the back of my linen closet with the handmade quilt. Hiding her gift to me wouldn’t honor the woman I loved.

And so it is with all the talents, characteristics, abilities and personality that God magnificently patched together in each of us.

It took me too many years, dozens of dog-eared books, and employment at Shepherds Ministries to figure out my purpose, which is why I’m so happy for our college students. They each will go through a new class called On and For Purpose (O4P) in their first year of the college program. 

Miss Houk and Mrs. Konopasek, two women passionate about helping others discover their purpose, teach this important, life-changing class.

Miss Houk

Mrs. Konopasek

Last week, the students started their personal path to finding Purpose by learning its definition. The teachers led them through a variety of activities designed to relate to their different learning styles.

The tactile learners benefitted from writing definitions of key words from Psalm 139:13-16:

“For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb.  I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

The visual and auditory learners absorbed the lesson best by watching DVD clips from Facing the Giants 

“If we win, we praise Him. If we lose, we praise Him.”

and reciting Psalm 139:13-16. 

And the kinesthetic learners no doubt thought the Play-Doh® activity was pretty cool. The students were asked to take the dough and create something in five minutes. Then they were to share their object and its purpose with the rest of the class.

Isaac

Geovanni

Joseph

Willetta

Suzanne

Justin

Mrs. Anderson

Andrew

Olya

Tommy

This lesson was a success! The students were engaged, and they understood the meaning of purpose by the end of the class.

Later this semester, Miss Houk and Mrs. Konopasek will guide the students in discovering their individual personalities and strengths, and then learn how to communicate what they find out about themselves in a way that others will understand. By the 2^nd semester each student will be able to write their own personal purpose statement which will become part of their resumes. I’ll cover these lessons in future blogs. 

Please pray for our students as God reveals His purpose for their lives in the coming months.

 

Shepherds College - Guiding Your Transition to Appropriate Independence. Please visit us at www.shepherdscollege.edu.

The Office: Thoughts on Ai and Work

Written by Brian Canright, Lead Recruiter and Transition Coordinator for Shepherds College



In this blog, I will focus on the first two principles of Appropriate Independence.

Created on and For A Purpose… 

For me, life has been a process of awakening to the diverse and expansive nature of God’s activity in the world, corresponding with an ever emerging clarity on how my unique set of strengths can be developed and concentrated to join Him.  The journey of self-discovery has been, and I assume will continue to be, arduous. As Sir Ken Robinson has stated, 

“Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”

I’ve learned a lot about myself by not fitting in, failing, enduring difficult circumstances, and by doing a thousand things I didn’t like doing, for thousands of hours I would have preferred to be doing something else. But through those experiences I’ve learned just as much about who God has made me and what he has created me for. There is always something to learn from every experience. 

The greatest single factor influencing my decision to return to Shepherds College in this new role was a clearer sense of vocation and identity forged through a diversity of life experiences. 

Individuals for Community 

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability” – Sir Ken Robinson

In Robert Bellah’s book, Habits of the Heart, he describes “expressive individualism” as the primary contributor to our culture’s lack of “capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together.” His proposal for transformation is to “re-appropriate the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one’s own achievement.”

 Tim Keller in his book, Every Good Endeavor, describes vocation as work “re-imagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment, and self-realization slowly crushes a person and undermines society itself.”

 

There is dignity and value in every good work. For example, when I think about the roles people play here at Shepherds College, and I consider how each role plays a part of the whole, one of the most essential responsibilities is to sanitize the door handles, dining room, kitchen and bathrooms to prevent the spread of germs and microbes. In so doing, the employees in domestics literally save lives; seriously! Does that fit the criteria of a vocation? Absolutely! 

Each uniquely designed student at Shepherds College possesses a set of qualities, strengths and abilities which are intended to contribute to the distinctive character of their communities. They have been undergoing this process for three years, and it will continue for a lifetime. 

I encourage them to learn from every experience.

I hope they see the work they do (whether paid or voluntary) as a calling to contribute to their communities in a meaningful, God-glorifying way.

And I hope they experience the fulfillment that comes with doing something of such great importance. 

Shepherds College - Guiding Your Transition to Appropriate Independence. Please visit us at www.shepherdscollege.edu.

Their Time to Shine

My school years were just plain awful.

I was the girl who was so painfully shy that I could physically make myself disappear in a classroom full of people. I hunched, I shrunk, I blended, I whispered, I blanked all expression from my face, and I actually became… nothing.

For the most part, people didn’t look at me or see me, and on those rare occasions when they did, I could detect a hint of mild interest or curiosity in their eyes, like I was a sweater someone left draped over a desk chair and they wondered why I was forgotten. But then, the interest would quickly fade – it’s only an old sweater – and the look in their eyes said, “She’s inconsequential.”

Sometimes I can see this – for lack of a better word – talent for becoming nothing in the body language of some of the 1^st year students when they arrive on campus in August. I know that they too have silently been told by society that they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

I want to take them by the shoulders, look right into their eyes and urgently say, “In the three years you’re at Shepherds College, you’ll learn that you do matter. You’ll learn that your life has purpose and meaning. You’ll find where you fit in this world and you will LOVE who God created you to be.”

In my little corner of Shepherds College, I get to witness this transition, and even take part in it in some small way. The best part of my job in Marketing is taking the words, the faces, the stories of these beautiful people and putting them out there for the rest of the world to see.

There’s something spiritual about the transformation that overcomes a student in that moment when they stop feeling irrelevant and realize that they are seen and heard and recognized as significant.

Sometimes all it takes is a camera held in front of them and a gentle question, "May I take your picture?”  I sense hesitancy, then hear, “Are you going to put me on Facebook?” At my nod, they stand straighter and smile as I snap the shutter release. They turn to their new friends and say with a confidence I’ve not yet heard from them, “I’m going to be on Facebook.” They look several inches taller as they walk away.

I’ve witnessed wonder blossom on closed-off faces as students recognize themselves on national magazine covers or featured in articles. One girl asked, “Are people actually going to read about me?” She couldn't believe her life story had value.

Recently Tess, Dallas and Christian were interviewed about their experience at the college on the local Racine & Me program, airing this Saturday. I had the opportunity to watch the DVD of the show after the taping. These students showed themselves to be self-assured young adults who represented the college with dignity and poise. They used their voices to be heard and to make an impact on their community! 

After the interview, Tess walked up to my desk and, in all sincerity, asked if I would like her autograph.  I cherish that moment! Tess knew that she was somebody important, and she had attributed worth to her being. I had her autograph the DVD and then she left my desk to autograph my co-worker’s notepaper.

I am so excited to see what all our students do once they are trained for life, empowered to serve and filled with new purpose!  

When these concepts become realities and begin to change the character of the student, they lose the “I am nothing” lies the world has fed them and fairly shine with the confidence of knowing that they are children of the Most High God, created by Him with the ability to influence the lives of people around them.

 

Shepherds College - Guiding Your Transition to Appropriate Independence. Please visit us at www.shepherdscollege.edu.

Feeling Weird?

I’ve heard it said many times over the years, “There’s something different about Shepherds. You feel at peace as soon as you step onto campus.”  After making this statement, one person added, “It’s weird, but I love it!”

Weird? I had to smile.  Maybe when compared to a bustling organization whose main goal is to show a profit at the end of every fiscal year, but when an organization puts “Spiritual Growth” high on its list of desired outcomes, as Shepherds College does, that “peaceful” feeling is not weird at all!

It’s not that we don’t bustle – just watch the Res Life staff in the dorms after school. And it’s not that we don’t feel stress or concern (have you ever visited campus during finals week?). We have our share of problems. Copy machines break down. Students fight. Teachers get sick. Plans don’t work out.

So why do people often use the word “peaceful” when they visit Shepherds College?

The staff at Shepherds College recognizes that peaceful feeling as the presence of God.  He is invited here every day with our prayers. He is honored through our words and actions. And He is loved through our service to young adults with intellectual disabilities. 

The staff is regularly encouraged to stay close to Him, to strengthen their relationship with Him through practices which result in spiritual growth.

The results are amazing! 

You know that peaceful feeling you get when you arrive on campus? Well, it’s inside each one of us working here too. It comes from knowing who God is, walking in His ways, and realizing His purpose for our lives.  Our deepest desire as staff at Shepherds College is to have the students also know this peace, not just by strolling around the sidewalks admiring the flowers and breathing in the clean, country air, but by carrying it around inside of them each and every day. 

To this end, Shepherds College provides many opportunities for spiritual growth:

Bible Courses – Each semester, students take two Bible courses designed to increase their knowledge of God, His Word, and His plan for their lives. This semester our 1^st year students will take Personal Bible Study and Roots of Faith, the 2^nd year students will take Apologetics and Life of Christ, and the 3^rd year students will take New Testament Letters and Ready 4 Life.

Church Attendance – Once students get used to the routine of college, it is our expectation that they will attend weekly church services. We will provide transportation every Sunday morning to one of six different churches in the area.

Miranda presenting in Chapel

Chapel – On Monday mornings, a chapel service is offered in the Commons. This service focuses on worship, prayer, and Bible instruction for the students.

Spiritual Counseling – Our students are provided with numerous opportunities to receive counseling based on the truths from God’s Word. This counseling may come from the teacher in a classroom setting, or it may come to an individual from his Academic Advisor, Residential Life Staff or even from our campus psychologist, Dr. Russ Kinkade.

Scripture Memory – An important piece of spiritual growth is the memorization of Scripture. Students are encouraged to commit God’s Word to memory on a regular basis through Bible classes.

Service Opportunities – We recognize the value of service to others and are committed to providing our students with plenty of opportunities to serve. Staff will look at the individual strengths and gifts of the students before attempting to place them in service opportunities.

So, is feeling peaceful on a busy campus filled with yelling, laughing, running students weird? Yeah, maybe for the rest of the world. But it’s the norm at Shepherds College.

Shepherds College - Guiding Your Transition to Appropriate Independence. Please visit us at www.shepherdscollege.edu.