You don’t arrive at your purpose. You live it first, in the not-knowing, and then you spend the rest of your life handing the map to someone still lost in the dark.
Picture the hospital room at the end. Not the bed. The chairs.
The raised bed is where you will lie one day, propped up, tubes or no tubes, thin light coming through the blinds, and you will do the one thing every man swears he is too busy to do. You will reflect. And here is what I have come to believe. You will not measure your life by the goals on the wall behind you. You will measure it by the people who pulled those hard plastic chairs close and refused to leave. Purpose gets defined right there, in who stayed, whether you hit the number or not.
And while you lie there, two eulogies will start writing themselves. The one you rehearsed. And the one that is actually true.
I have spent the last three years serving a single idea. That one day, far off, someone will stand up and give the complete account of me, and I have wanted to know what it would sound like. That is a strange thing to serve. But I think a lot of us are serving it without admitting it. We are performing for a room we will not be alive to hear.
Everyone Says the Same Three Words
Ask a hundred people what their purpose is. Ninety of them will say the same three words. To help people.
I believe it. I have said it myself. My purpose is to help people. But I want you to sit with something uncomfortable. I have never met a single person who told me their purpose was anything else. Not one. Everybody, deep down, wants to help. So if we all share the exact same answer, then that answer cannot be the thing that makes your life yours.
You walk past people every day who do not understand their purpose. Some of them do not even know what the word is supposed to mean. So they wander. They chase meaning down every hallway, checking every door, when the whole time the thing they are looking for was sealed inside them before they took their first breath.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” That is not poetry. That is a blueprint. The meaning was never out there to be hunted. It was in here to be uncovered.
Purpose Is God’s Vision Wearing Your Face
So let me say the thing that reordered everything for me.
Helping people is not your purpose. It is God’s vision for you. It is the assignment written over all of us. Ephesians says it plainly, that we are God’s handiwork, created to do good works He prepared in advance for us to do. The good works are the vision. They are the destination He set before you ever showed up.
Your purpose is the how. It is the exact, particular, unrepeatable way that only you can do the helping.
That is the part that is yours. That is the part that has your fingerprints on it. When a man tells me his purpose is to help people, I do not correct him. I go to work with him. I help him figure out the how, and the what, and the who. Because the vision is shared, but the method is a signature. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and I think half our restlessness is not doubt about whether we have a purpose. It is the ache of carrying a how we have not yet learned to use.
Mine came into focus like this. My purpose is to help other people see their purpose, and then fulfill it. To take someone who is wandering the hallway and turn their face toward the door that was theirs all along.
You Live It First, in the “I Don’t Knows”
Here is where most people get purpose backwards. They think you find it, and then you live it. Clean. Sequential. Like picking up a tool and finally starting the job.
It does not work that way. You live it first.
The how did not come to me from a mountaintop. It came from the mud. From vulnerability I did not want to show. From lessons I would have paid good money to skip. From standing in front of people and saying the two words a man is trained his whole life to swallow. I don’t know. I learned that the path to purpose is not paved by the ones who have it figured out. It is lit by the ones willing to admit, out loud, that they do not.
You want to know your how? Look at what you have already survived. Look at the exact place you bled and kept walking. That scar is not damage. That is curriculum. That is the specific medicine you were made to carry to the next person still lying in the wound you already climbed out of.
You do not just arrive at your purpose. You live it first, and then your journey does not end. It turns outward. It becomes the work of helping someone else fulfill theirs. Purpose is not hard to find. It was never far away. It is constrained inside you, pressing on the walls, waiting for you to stop searching the horizon and start digging where you stand.
The Two Eulogies
So back to that room. Back to the two eulogies.
The one you rehearse is polished. It is the highlight reel, the mission statement, the version where every hard call was noble and every stumble had a reason. That is the one you have been serving. I served it for three years.
But the one that gets given, the true one, is quieter and better. When I finally hear mine spoken at the pearly gates, I do not need it to say I was perfect. I know better and so does everyone who has ever loved me. I want it to say I was a good man and a flawed one. Far from perfect. But willing. Willing to drop my guard so I could strengthen myself and everyone standing near me.
That is the eulogy I am after now. And the only way to earn it is to stop rehearsing it and start living it. So I do. Today. Out loud, guard down, in front of people who can see the cracks. And I will keep living it, because a eulogy is not written at the end. It is written every ordinary day you were too tired to fake it and chose to be real instead.
The people in the chairs will not remember your polish. They will remember that you let them close enough to see you were human, and that it made them braver about being human too.
The Midnight Move
Tonight, find the one person who is wandering the hallway right now, checking doors, telling you their purpose is to help people but they cannot see the how. Do not hand them advice. Hand them your scar. Tell them the exact thing you did not know, the season you were sure you were finished, and how you climbed out anyway. Watch what it does. That is not oversharing. That is you living your purpose, first, so they can find theirs.
What’s forged at midnight cannot be broken by the dawn.
— Gabriel Vangelatos, The Midnight Visionary