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