People Have Purpose

Walking into the apartment, all I saw were walls covered in clothes. It was weird. They didn’t belong there.The apartment’s tiny closet didn’t have much room. So the first missionary who arrived made space for her clothes. She hung them over pictures, took pictures down and used nails for her hangers, and had even placed some outfits between a wall and a chair. She made an apartment into a closet and left the closet space for me.***In my office, almost staring down at me, is a black-and-white picture of my grandfather as a young man. Dressed in a fancy double-breasted, pin-striped suit, he’s standing at a podium giving an important speech. I like to think that I inherited at least some of my word-smart, speech-making gifts from him.

I knew I wanted the picture above my desk, but I also knew we couldn’t use a ladder to reach the wall because of where my desk is. It couldn’t be moved so I wasn’t sure my idea would work. I called Brad and he came to help. He noticed where the desk’s legs met the desktop and made sure to step there. He made the desk into a ladder and hung the picture.

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Have you seen the special markers kids can color with that only work on certain paper? Unfortunately a little boy thought he had that kind of marker when he decided to “draw” on a table. Rather than it being harmless imaginative drawing, he quickly learned he was wrong.

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Things have purposes. People have purposes. Although some things can be used creatively to substitute for the real thing, not all substitutions work. The same is true for people. It’s best when we fulfill the purposes for which we were designed. Just as an apartment can become a closet, we can become who we need to be in certain situations – more outgoing than our norm, more detailed than our norm, quieter than our norm. But, we need to eventually return to our real design or we’ll pay a price. The same is true for children.

We celebrate kids when we help them become who they were designed to be so they can fulfill their purposes.