What is Your Purpose?

“The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. - Mark Twain

I love this quote. It boils everything in our human existence down to one simple sentence. It’s certainly consistent with biblical values. We are given life by our Creator, upon which all else depends. It precedes all the choices we make – it is the root of who we are.
 
Our purpose on this earth is the second implied question. As humans, we seek meaning and try to understand the purpose for our lives, and fulfilling this need is central not only to who we are in relation to the rest of humanity, but who we are in the face of the God who made us as well. However, as much as I like this quote, I would add a third important day. The day you discover who controls your life.
 
Look at the first part of the quote. Clearly, we were not in control of our birth; most would suggest that if anyone was in control, it was our parents. However, our parents did not in some amazing way confer life upon us – they simply provided the building blocks for life. Something or someone else was in control of creating our life and allowing us to be born. If being born was truly one of the two most important days of your life, then it follows that you would want to know who made this day happen and was in control of it.
 
The second part of the quote is similar. Why would someone want to know the reason they were created unless they could act on it? Let’s say that you discover you were created to play Tetris for the rest of your life, although I truly wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Once you “discover” that Tetris is your life’s purpose, what happens? You find out everything you can about the game, you devote years studying the best possible strategies and moves, and you spend day and night playing the game.
 
Did you notice which word appears most often in that last sentence? You. It suggests that once your purpose is discovered, it’s on you to make the most of it. You need to work and realize your potential and fulfill your life’s mission. You need to work on becoming the world’s best Tetris player. It’s up to you. You are in control.
 
I would suggest that knowing who controls your life answers both implied questions in the quote. Once you know who controls your life, you can determine who put you together as a person and who determines your life purpose. If nobody/nothing is in control of your life, then you were a collection of cells that, in some highly improbable manner, formed a human and somehow “became living”. It then follows that your life purpose can be defined by you. You are in control. On the other hand, if someone made you and has a purpose for your life, it becomes a very different story. That is the crux of the issue.
 
As a Christian, I believe I was created by God, and my purpose on this earth is to glorify Him. But notice that answering this question does not say how I should best glorify God. That is revealed to us by the Holy Spirit and our inclinations, genetic traits, talents, etc., that were hard-coded at our creation.
 
Those of us at North Dakota Family Alliance do policy work supporting and advancing biblical principles. That is our purpose. I would hazard a guess that doing policy work is not your purpose in life. We glorify God by doing this work, but you may glorify God by homeschooling your children, working at your office, or perhaps harvesting your crops. However, since our purpose is policy work, we do it with all the tools and resources we can to achieve what He wills for our lives. We take it seriously and know you depend on us to defend your biblical values. Thank you for your faithful support in fulfilling this purpose.
 
Finding out who created you and what your purpose is can become a lifelong journey for some. I don’t know how you arrived at the point of knowing God controls your life, but it is the answer to almost every question you may have. That doesn’t mean life will be easy or always make sense, but you thankfully have a path to follow, which is more than many people.
 
Today, rejoice that you know your purpose. The future of your life may not be apparent all the time, but the path He has chosen is what you need to walk. When you are living in God’s will, nothing can match that feeling. Enjoy the journey; He’s got you.

Where My Understanding Ends

We used to sing a song called Rejoice pretty regularly at Evangel (VOUS Worship). One portion of the chorus goes like this: “Where my understanding ends, there's a peace that makes no sense”. I like that line. Especially coming off another legislative session.

If you’re like me, you seek to understand; to make sense of things. It’s something beyond mere curiosity, but is focused on the why and not just the what. And not just the first or even second layer of explanation, but we follow it as far down as it goes until we are satisfied we’ve answered why.

I believe it is how we were created. While we see animals try to understand the why, it only goes so far. The famous gorilla Koko learned over 2,000 words and quickly figured out that the why for getting grapes was because she demonstrated an understanding of new words. Annie, our dog, has figured out why she gets a treat: because she sits and waits for it until I tell her she may get it. However, I daresay that Koko never wondered why she was being taught words, just as Annie does not wonder why she was trained to wait to grab the treat. They simply know on a very rudimentary level that a causes b – that’s the why.

We humans are not so easily satisfied. If we were given a grape every time we learned a new word, we would wonder about a lot of things. Why am I being rewarded for this behavior? What is being studied through this reward system? Why was I chosen for this experiment? And perhaps most importantly, what in the world am I doing in a cage with a plexiglass window?

We are pretty proud of ourselves when we fully understand something (as if that could ever completely happen). Why does the perceived pitch/frequency of something such as a police car's siren change as it moves past us? Because of the Doppler Effect. Pretty impressive that we figured that out, right? We have figured out the why behind diseases, human behavior, physical phenomena, and much more. But because we’re so good at it, we take not only pride in our ability to understand, but start to believe that if we dig deep enough, we can figure out anything. As Francis Bacon believed, “God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.”

The same is true in the public policy world. During the legislative session, we need to be experts on why things happen. Why bills are introduced. Why committees or legislators vote a certain way. Why Governor Armstrong decided to sign or perhaps veto a bill. While we can often ferret out some reasons, we are always left with unanswered questions. It is where our understanding ends, and it is where God’s peace enters the picture.

Ideally, we should have the peace of God during all of session, but I’m sorry to tell you that it just doesn’t happen for most of us. Unfortunately, it takes our understanding to hit a wall so that we have no choice but to trust in that “peace that makes no sense”. How can we explain that? We can’t understand the why behind it; however, God gives it to us freely and reminds us to rest in Him.

There are many things one must understand to shepherd a ministry like NDFA – lots of operational, tactical, and strategic things. If you do them correctly, you can look back and be pretty impressed with yourself. After all, the ability to tackle 62 bills this past session and to end up winning most of them is impressive. But we deceive ourselves if we think our great understanding of the issues is the primary thing that leads us to that place.

I regularly pray for NDFA, as I hope you do. I pray that we may have the funding to continue and hopefully grow our work. I pray for a lasting increase in pro-life and pro-family biblical values in North Dakota. I pray that we do a good job of educating and providing information to you on key issues. However, there is one thing I consistently pray for every day: that we at NDFA remain humble.

As it says in Proverbs 3, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” NDFA is the Lord’s ministry; we are caretakers. I’d like to think that we understand more about public policy than Koko the gorilla, but I also hope we are never too proud to admit that we don’t have all the answers and we’re at peace with that.

Are Your Files Backed Up?

As I write this weekly email, my computer is backing up its c: drive. We need to move the desktop computer to a new room, and I’m always a bit paranoid that something will go wrong, so it’s making a permanent record of the operating system, relevant databases, Excel and Word files, PowerPoint presentations, the 393 weekly emails I’ve written, and more. The bits and bytes are flying to an external backup drive even as I write this. I’ve been thinking that while computers and humans have certain characteristics in common, the ability to make and use backups is not one of them.

One might make the argument that memories are a sort of mental backup. Memories serve an excellent purpose, from giving context and perspective to life to turning into stories that endlessly entertain our grandchildren. However, as fine as they are, memories are not backups. Let me use an example.

Some time ago, I loaded some new software onto our home computer and things did not go according to plan, to put it mildly. It was so bad that the machine wouldn’t even boot off a USB thumb drive. It was an incredibly frustrating and alarming event that took me from 2 am to 8 am to fix (helpful hint: don’t install new software late at night). I was finally able to use a backup from a week before to get things up and running (second helpful hint: create backups regularly).

By returning to that backup, I effectively reversed time from my computer’s perspective. It was now operating as if nothing had gone wrong at all. All was well, and it could simply go on its merry way doing what it was supposed to do. All software installation mishaps, work it had done, files it had created, and changes to the operating system were yet to come in the future, if so chosen by our family.

Now, the restore from the backup had two distinct components: reading the backup image to see what had changed, and then copying the appropriate files back to the c: drive. The memory in this case was the backup image; the actual backup was a set of files that, when written to the c: drive, physically changed things to how they were earlier.

Humans have memories, which do not have the ability to change past events. We do not have backups that can actually alter the past and restore events to a prior time. However, there is an “exception clause” of sorts.

The things we want to change in our past are almost always bad things, not unlike the crash of a computer. The exception clause is that God is able to actually back up our lives to a pure point where the bad things didn’t happen, through justification in Christ. It’s as if those things never happened. The irony here is that we will still have the memories, but the events effectively never occurred in His eyes, which is what truly matters.

In the policy world, as in other aspects of life, we have our memories and would often like to reverse past events. Bills in our ND legislature that did not pass, decisions by local school boards, and questionable SCOTUS rulings. We have the memories, but can’t change the past.

However, that’s OK. Our failures in changing laws, losing elections, and other policy defeats are wiped clean with God’s backup. He simply asks us to be faithful and advance his Kingdom in the policy arena.

It’s a wonderful thing to know that there is a backup to overwrite every mistake and wrong I’ve done or every bad thing that’s ever happened (including a bad installation of software). Just don’t confuse memories with backups. The memories of these events may stay with us or fade over time, but regardless, the backups will always belong to God.

The Road Less Traveled

We have a framed poster hanging in our house that depicts a well-known image Christ spoke about – the narrow and wide gates and their associated roads (Matthew 7:13-14). The poster is a very old and fascinating depiction of that bible passage, and it’s a good reminder of the decisions we make in life that take us down one path or another.

One of the interesting features of the poster is the list of building titles, each representing sins or virtuous actions along life’s journey. Many reflect a time gone by. Some of the sins include buildings such as a movie theater, bar, loan shop, and dance hall. On the narrow road, the buildings include a deaconess institution, a Sunday school, and, of course, a church. It shows the wide road ending with a city on fire; the narrow one has a heavenly city at its terminus.

The poster seems quaint to us today, but the basic choice is still the same, even if the buildings have changed. Perhaps today’s buildings on the wide road might be named abortion clinic, religious discrimination club, LGBT indoctrination school, or something similar. On the narrow road may be the church, Christian parents, or a crisis pregnancy clinic.

Regardless of language, we still make choices each day. The small ones – essentially each step on one of those roads – matter. As Paul Tripp put it, "The character of a person's life is shaped in 10,000 little moments. You carry the character formed in the mundane into those rare consequential moments of life."

So, our journey matters, but we are not traveling the road of life alone. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about this journey we are taking on these roads. He says in his book The Weight of Glory:

…the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities… that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

You see, whether we help each other to one or the other of these destinations is of supreme importance. I find it hard to reconcile the Great Commission with helping someone dance their way down that wide road.

We have similar choices in the political arena. We have many opportunities to take the easy, wide road. To not get involved with more controversial topics. To let certain values slip a bit when societal pressure hammers us. To not always hold legislators accountable for their actions. However, at NDFA, we do not believe that is the way we should conduct ourselves if we truly believe biblical values are to be defended and advanced in ND. We must be bold and stay on the narrow road.

For precisely that reason, we helped support bills this session dealing with safeguarding life, protecting God’s children from human traffickers, fighting against pornographic materials, preserving religious freedom, and much more. It is also for that reason that you have received our 2025 Legislative Scorecard. We don’t take the easy road, and neither should our legislators if they stand for pro-life and pro-family values. By the same token, those who do protect biblically based policy should be recognized and affirmed by all of us for their faithful stance.

Like so much of life, public policy comes down to doing things the right way, which is often the hardest way, or doing them the wrong but much easier way. It comes down to that poster with the two roads. At NDFA, we always want to be traveling on the narrow road, right by your side. Thank you for allowing us to be your traveling companion.

Join Us For an Upcoming Prayer Event!

Please plan to join us at the upcoming prayer event, Audience With the King, which will be happening on Friday, September 26, at the North Dakota State Capitol in Bismarck.  We plan to pray over areas of Bismarck from each corner of the Observation Deck, while we are able to see that portion of the city.  A prayer guide will be available for those who would like to participate. Please join others in lifting up our city and state during the noon hour. Please RSVP to NDP10days@outlook.com. On Friday, simply enter through the south public access entrance to the Capitol, and we will have people to guide you all the way to the Observation Deck. 

This event is cosponsored by NDFA as well as the following people and organizations.
 
Ruth Jorritsma and Karen Boelter
ND Co-State Coordinators, National Day of Prayer
 
Jen Einrem
Coordinator, 10 Days

We hope to see you there!