Living purposefully, and thoughts on Lent.

"Have you ever thought much about time?", asked the pastor leading the service on Sunday. Throughout the service, some thoughts I've been having for a little while became a lot clearer, to the point I felt better able to articulate them. Whilst the sermon was encouraging us, among a number of other things, to make a continuous choice to live for God; I realised that my goal - what I would like - is this: to live with purpose.

The way I am saying this, I do not mean "to live as though I have a role to play on this earth" - though I am happy to admit that I firmly believe I am here for a reason - but rather, to continuously decide to live in a manner consistent with individual goals. What does this mean?

It means I can talk about wanting to run a half marathon by the end of 2013; but to do so I need to  accept that it will mean that I will need to set time aside to train for a marathon. For instance, in the short run (no pun intended), it means that I need to spend less time messing around online and watching TV shows, and more time running, stretching, exercising, training.

It means that it is fine for me to say that "speaking French feels foreign and weird when I try to speak it now" even though I am technically fluent in it; but that if I want to keep up the fluency, I need to be willing to spend 15 minutes a day reading out loud in French, or speaking French with my sister.

It means that I can say all I like about wanting to pass all the exams I have to sit this year to be part qualified by the end of 2013; but that will involve spending evenings and weekends studying, rather than travelling up and down the country, rather than watching TV shows.

However, in order to apply this to my life, being aware that even a life lived with purpose will have its time constraints, I have had to narrow down the things that are most important to me, to happiness and my more immediate life goals.

For this year, in broad strokes, the things are:
1. Making time for God - which means more time in the week focused on church, more time reading; which means less time messing around online or watching TV shows on Sundays.
2. Running - which means a) SIGNING UP FOR RACES, and  b) TRAINING - which means more time training and stretching and doing my physio exercises for my knee, which in turn, again, means less time messing around.
3. Passing my exams and keeping my job - which is deeply intertwined with "keeping healthy" and therefore with "taking time out" and also "cooking"; but which means keeping alert in courses, doing homework, and being consistent.
4. Maintaining strong friendships - I have incredible friends, and I am deeply blessed by how fabulous they are; and maintaining friendships involves making time for them, which means taking time and money which may be spent on other things ("messing around", usually - are we sensing a theme yet?) to focus on them.

Four is a lovely manageable number; and therefore, I resolve to tailor my life towards those things and less towards others.

Furthermore, in the spirit of living purposefully, I am generally aiming to live in a more internally consistent way, which includes living a more morally consistent life. I can say I am deeply affected by the spread of homelessness and then do nothing, or I can do something about it: donate time or money or both, for instance. Similarly, I can say that I do not like the thought of eating animals who will have suffered as they have been slaughtered for food, that I do not like an industry that promotes fear and suffering, that I have problems with the environmental impact of rearing animals for food, and then still go an eat a chicken sandwich; or I can act in a way consistent with the way I feel about it.


And so, in the spirit of living with purpose, and living an internally consistent life, I arrive at the following thoughts for Lent.

For Lent, I will be giving up animal products* - in order to make morally consistent choices; and I will be avoiding social media (Facebook and Twitter) - in order to allow to spend more time focused a) on God, but also b) on those other things which matter.

For Lent, I resolve to begin to live purposefully.

What are you doing over Lent?






*Those of you who have known me for long enough know that this is not the first time I have tried this; and also know the reasons I had for stopping those times. The same caveat applies to this attempt: if my mental health suffers because of it, my internal moral consistency still says that my own health matters more than animal ethics, and therefore I would stop.