Why Am I Here?

By:
William Hendricks
Perspective:
header for Why Am I Here?

It’s not about you.” So begins Rick Warren’s mega-bestseller, The Purpose-Driven Life. That has to be one the best first sentences of a book since Genesis 1:1.

“It’s not about you.” I couldn’t agree more. So much wisdom wrapped up in those four simple words. So many implications. So appropriate for our times. And so true.

But incurably contrarian as I am, I want to make one quarter-twist to that assertion: it’s not about you—until it is about you! Then it seems like it’s all about you.

The questions of purpose are all about you: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do with my life? What should I be doing for work? Do I matter? Am I making any difference in the world? What are my strengths? What’s my calling? What am I passionate about? What do I have to offer? Am I good enough? Am I capable enough? Do I have what it takes? Am I worthy? Is there any hope for me?

Rick Warren does a much better job than I can explaining that this world is ultimately not about you but about God. But in this book, my focus is on you. And if it’s about you, it’s about God, too. The two of you are inseparably linked together, the way an artistic masterpiece is linked to a master artist. That’s how God set it all up. Whatever involves you involves Him.

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

The prevailing story in our culture says that your life is your own. You have to take responsibility for yourself. You are the master of your fate. What you do with your life is totally up to you. We even have laws in place to protect everyone’s right to self-determination.

Unfortunately, giftedness presents that way of thinking with an inconvenient truth: your life is a gift, not something you sovereignly own outright.

No one wants to hear that! “What do you mean, my life is not my own? That’s ridiculous! That sounds totally oppressive and enslaving. I won’t stand for that!”

No one wants to be owned. The people of Jesus’ day certainly didn’t. They despised the Romans who occupied their land. One imposition they especially resented was a poll tax they were forced to pay. Jesus’ enemies tried to exploit that conflict by posing Him with a trick question: Under God’s law, was it right for the Jews to pay the tax to their pagan overlords? If Jesus said yes, He would not be a good Jew. If He said no, He would be liable for treason.

Jesus asked for one of the coins used to pay the tax. Pointing to it, He asked, “This engraving—who does it look like? And whose name is on it?” His opponents confirmed that the coin had been issued by Caesar. To which Jesus replied, “Then give Caesar what is his.”

In one simple object lesson, Jesus sidestepped their trap by posing the overriding issues of ownership and authority. Like it or not, the Romans were in charge. Paying the tax meant acknowledging that reality, not necessarily agreeing with it.

But then, as He so often did, Jesus turned the tables on His enemies by adding a parting shot: “and give God what is his” (Matthew 22:15-22, MSG).

What in the world is that about? Well, given the context, it’s clearly about ownership and authority. Jesus is saying, if you give Caesar what belongs to him, why not give God what belongs to Him? After all, He’s in charge of everything and everyone. He owns it all. Including you. What do we see when we look at you? Who do you look like? And whose name, or inscription, is on you? God’s! Because that’s what it means for you to be made in God’s image. Every time someone looks at you, whether they realize it or not—whether you realize it or not— they’re seeing a unique expression of God that they otherwise wouldn’t get to see. God has stamped you with His image, His likeness. When we deal with you, it turns out we’re dealing with God, too. He made you to remind people of Him. He owns you.

Except that God is not in any way like the capricious and authoritarian Caesars. What He owns He delights in and broods over like a mother hen.

And yet the human heart instinctively resists submitting to a higher authority, whether it be God or anyone else. We all want to be our own kings and queens. Which is actually further evidence that we are stamped with God’s image: we instinctively incline toward ruling.

You can see that this puts you in a bit of a bind. A crisis, actually. At some point while you’re trying to answer the questions of life, you’re going to have to decide who owns you and who’s in charge—you, or God? Is it “My will be done” or “Thy will be done”? That’s the question that underlies all other questions.

Having It Your Way

Call me cynical, but I can’t imagine that most people will choose to say, “Thy will be done.” At least, not in the individualistic culture in which I live. Can you? Look at the people around you. What do you see? I see a lot of folks rejecting that arrangement outright: “No way!” A lot more have adopted a rather dismissive attitude about it all: “Maybe God owns me, maybe not. But so what?”

I see a lot of others who’ve decided to hedge their bets. In their heart they know God is real, so they can’t just blow Him off. But they’re certainly not prepared to hand over the deed to their life. Who knows where that might lead! So they try to steer a middle course and adopt a lifestyle of largely doing life their way, but tolerating “a little bit of God” on the side. You know, some church attendance, maybe occasional prayers before a meal or something, having a preacher at weddings and funerals, that sort of thing. God has His place in the picture, but He’s in the background—often way in the background. He’s certainly not in charge.

And then there’s a bunch of people who for some reason think they can strike a deal with God: “Lord, I’ll try to be a good person and not do anything too bad, and in exchange You bless me with good health, a decent income, and happiness.” They turn God into a celestial credit card. It’s okay to max it out, just don’t get behind in the payments. But it’s still all about them.

And finally, I see an awful lot of procrastinators who simply put the question off by saying, “I’ll get to all of this stuff someday. Right now I’ve got other fish to fry.”

No one wants to be owned, including me. But nevertheless, a primary law of human nature remains in effect: anytime our gift is decoupled from the Gift-giver, things will not end well.

Even if they appeared to start off well. That’s been the case for me and 76 million other Baby Boomers (perhaps you’re one of them). When we were graduating from college, the United States was the only game in town, economically speaking. Europe was still rebuilding from World War II. The Soviet Union was starting to gasp under the weight of the socialist, bureaucratic bloat that would ultimately be its undoing. China was still under Mao. India, Japan, and the other Asian players were still on their way up. South America and Africa were not even in consideration.

And so there were plenty of jobs for us. So many, in fact, that you could jump around all through your twenties and try things out, with very few consequences. You didn’t have to get serious about life until thirty or later. But by then, most Boomers had settled into a decent-paying job that covered a mortgage. From there, the money started to flow.

There’s nothing wrong with a strong economy. But it was all about us. Favored, gifted, educated, with nothing standing in our way, the world was our oyster. “My will be done” became our credo. And in no time at all, the Me Generation, which swore it would never repeat the sins of its parents by engaging in those awful vices of greed and materialism, grew up to become the most affluent, self-involved, self-preoccupied, and self-serving population of narcissists the world has yet known. (I speak, obviously, of Boomers as a whole; plenty of exceptions could be mentioned.)

Self-indulgence may be the worst way to misuse your giftedness. You can actually be in the sweet spot and thrive as a result, but it’s all about you—what you want, what you need, what you think, what works for you.

Money only multiplies the distractions from what matters in life. It can make you indifferent to others, especially those who haven’t “made it” yet or never will. And in cases where those people can’t be ignored, it makes it easier to just write a check than to get involved. If you’re self-centered, you can be very pretty to look at, but you’re impossible to relate to, because you don’t need anyone. You already have yourself.

However, life has a way of reminding people that making it all about yourself is a bad business. I know a man who told me about getting ready to cash out of a business venture in which he had made a personal fortune. He met three of his buddies for dinner to get their input on life after the payday. They all cheered his success, but then the table fell silent.

Puzzled, he asked them what was wrong. One by one they recounted their own experiences. Each one had similarly thrived in an entrepreneurial venture before selling out. Each one had quickly blown a significant amount of money on a toy—a boat, a plane, a mountain getaway. And each one had gotten divorced.

The man began to poll others in his network. To date he has formally interviewed thirty-nine other men who have sold their companies for a profit. None of them said his life was particularly better for doing that. Almost all of them found that financial independence only made their life more fragile, not less. A number had had affairs and other breaches of character. (He told me, “Bill, who you are before you make the money is who you’ll be after you make the money. All the money does is afford you greater opportunities.”) Thirty-three were divorced. Many of them turned to diversions like playing golf, purchasing an exotic car, or buying a boat. Most of the ones who did lost interest in their new hobby within eighteen months or less.

My acquaintance summed things up by saying, “Bill, these guys had it all, but every single one of them was in a crisis of meaning.”

Going Passive

At the polar opposite of such superachievers, you can also become like the third manager in the parable of the talents, simply burying your gift instead of investing it. You bury your gift by not using it, for whatever reason. You may be ignorant that you have giftedness (no one who has read this far gets to claim that excuse!), or know about the phenomenon but not know what your gift is. But you can also have a pretty good idea what it is and simply ignore it because some other path appears easier, simpler, or more lucrative.

Occasionally when I work with a corporate client, I run into someone who’s on a payroll, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why. They show up every day, but they add almost no real value to the organization. One time I asked a guy like that to tell me his story. He said he’d been with the company for years. He didn’t feel one way or the other about whether he liked his job. It was just something that paid. He enjoyed going to the racetrack on the weekends, and a few times each year he went gambling in Vegas.

Given the alternatives, I suppose that fellow should be commended for at least paying his way by earning an honest living. But I can’t help but feel a tremendous sadness for a life wasted when I run into someone like that. They’re just marking time. They’re not causing trouble, but then, they’re not really doing anything of consequence, either. They treat their giftedness like a jar of spare change forgotten in a drawer.

And some people are just lazy and irresponsible. In the last chapter I described the compounding power of time in turning giftedness to the dark side. In a similar way, sloth is the learned habit of switching off your giftedness and going passive. I’m often asked, which is more important, giftedness or hard work? The answer is, neither is worth anything without the other. Giftedness is squandered on the lazy. Hard work is nothing but toil when you’re not gifted to the task. But laziness is a form of negligent disobedience to using your God-given strengths.

What About Your Giftedness?

I will never tell you what to do with your life. The responsibility for determining that lies solely with you. But I will always raise this question: What about your giftedness?

I could not in conscience do otherwise. I know that a great deal in this book flies squarely in the face of prevailing culture. Parts of it no doubt sound preposterous to some. Can this giftedness thing possibly be for real? But I feel like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. She goes into a wardrobe and finds herself in a snowy forest and meets a faun and spends an afternoon having tea with him. When she returns to her siblings, she can’t wait to tell them what happened. They don’t want to believe her. But she insists that it is so. She can’t deny what she knows to be true from her own experience.

Neither can I. Having personally listened to thousands of people’s stories,[1] I find in each case that there’s something there. There’s a phenomenon at play. I may not be describing that phenomenon very well or very accurately, and I may be getting the implications of it all wrong. But something is definitely there, something that seems profoundly important and remarkably powerful.

When I then compare those observations with the narrative from the Bible that I hold to, the pieces seem to corroborate in real time with what Scripture asserts about the nature of persons. The only conclusion I can come to is that God has given power to humans. I call that power your giftedness. His intention is that you would use that power hand in hand with Him. True, your giftedness will still “work” if you leave God out. But using it on your own will almost always turn out badly.


[1] I’m by no means the only person to have done that, nor did the techniques for doing that originate with me. Bernard Haldane began looking at people’s successes in the 1940s. Art Miller Jr. apprenticed under him in the late 1950s and early 60s, then started his own firm called People Management, Inc. (now SIMA International, Inc.). Hundreds of thousands of people have gone through the SIMA process that PMI developed. Ralph Mattson offers a similar process called DOMA. In addition to those practitioners and their colleagues, the whole field of psychometrics attests to the fact that people are unique. And in recent years, a psychology of positive human functioning, or positive psychology, has gained wide inter- est through the work and writings of Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, formerly of the University of Chicago and now at Claremont Graduate University.

For Further Reading:

The Person Called You

by Bill Hendricks

“I can’t stand my job anymore.”“I feel like I have no direction.”“What should I do with my life?”...

book cover for The Person Called You