Today, I am so thankful for my knowledge of the truth. I am thankful that there is more to life than the small moments that come and go. The moments that are so easy to take for granted are not the only valuable things that our life holds but there is more.
This past week, I had the opportunity to fly back to my Alma Mater to visit with friends and to walk at my graduation ceremony. That week was made up of so many small moments and it culminated at the end with my Commencement ceremony on May 13.
The week flew by. I was constantly with my friends and going back to my favorite places and staying up late trying to enjoy the limited time that I had with them. But I found myself thinking about just how short the time was.
I reminisced with friends about when we first met and how quickly the time seemed to have flown by for us. Four years is such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of life, and yet many people define themselves and their success by the few years they spend in college. But it all comes to an end in less than one minute when they announce your name and you walk across a stage. Then you have the whole rest of your life ahead of you and your largest accomplishment behind you. And we wonder why so many people in our society are so unhappy in their day-to-day adult lives. Why so many people lack a sense of purpose.
As I flew home from Steubenville yesterday and had time to think about my life and my accomplishments. I felt a sense of loss for the life I knew in Steubenville. I don’t know when I will be back, when I will see some of my best friends again. I wished I could have just frozen time and lived that life forever.
Unlike most of my peers who walked with me this weekend, I knew what my every day looked like before I crossed the stage, since I’ve been living it for four months already. My days in Iowa are not as exciting as they were in Steubenville. I don’t spontaneously go out with friends anymore, I don’t stay up late every night talking to my best friends who live down the hall from me. I don’t spend hours of my day sitting in a public place surrounded by the hustle and bustle of people coming and going.
My days consist of waking up early, praying, working in a quiet office, eating dinner while I watch half an episode of a tv show, reading a book, and being in bed by 9pm. It’s not exciting, and most people might think it’s depressing, and while the adjustment was hard I really love my quiet life now.
But if I had let my life add up to walking across that stage this weekend, I would hate my current life. It seems so unrewarding from the outside. I can just hear the voice of someone I knew in college asking me what on earth I do for fun if I don’t party, and from his point of view my life probably seems rather boring and lonely and tiresome. But I quite like my life.
My point is, if my point of view was a little different, I would be utterly depressed at my state in life right now. I just celebrated one of the biggest accomplishments that I will ever have in my life and if I let my life add up to that one minute on Saturday, there would be nothing else for me now. But we are so lucky that this is not all there is to life. I still have purpose even if I am no longer working towards a degree.
Every person in the Church has a common mission, it is to be a saint and to help as many other people as we can to also be saints. It’s easier for me to find ways to work towards this mission than it might be for you since I work for the Church, but you also can live out this mission in whatever your profession or vocation is.
God has given you a unique gift. You’ve used those gifts to get to where you are, to get your own degree, or your dream job, or a promotion, etc. Now you are called to continue to use it for the rest of your life. To get to heaven and to drag along your families, your friends, your coworkers, and whoever else you might encounter.
We were made to know, love, and serve God. We have purpose outside of worldly accomplishments that culminate in one moment where you receive recognition. Our worldly accomplishments are good and can often aid us in working towards our mission, but our life is not the sum of our worldly accomplishments.
When we make our life the sum of these big accomplishments, we settle for less that what we are made for, and as a result it is easy to lose our sense of purpose. Not only do we settle for less but we also often fail to see the dignity of the people who have accomplished less than us. We often think we have earned a higher place in society based on our accomplishments and we fail to value those who are not on that “level,” deeming them to be less than, undesirable, and unworthy.
We must learn to see that there is more to life than these accomplishments and these little moments that we use to prove our value. The fact is that we are valuable because God has created us with dignity and He loves us. We are worthy because He has made us so.
When we can see our own value through the eyes of the Lord and not the eyes of the world, we begin to see the value of every person we encounter through His eyes, and in that we learn to love as He loved, to give as He gave, and to serve as He served.
And when we can do that, we can accomplish the mission we were put on this earth to do.
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