Purpose Driven Life

The 40 Days of Purpose, a program based on the Purpose Driven Life, kicked off this week, and my small group had its first meeting. We will meet for 5 more weeks and discuss the book based on reading a chapter a day. I was gratified to learn that I do not have to buy into the Arminian heresy of the author in order to participate and that I can just disregard the heretical aspects of the author's theology.

The author, in the simulcast sermon that kicked off the program, went off on evangelism and the need to "save one more for Jesus". He stated explicitly that God wants to save everyone but that His will might be thwarted because I failed to reach someone with the message. Yikes! What if I turn them off with a badly phrased message or a hamfisted delivery? Am I still responsible for their hellboundedness? This is the kind of thing that sent me to the arms of the Calvinists.

That said, I am hoping that the program will be beneficial and lead to some fruitful discussions in the group and in the church community as a whole. Anything that promotes growth should be a good thing.

The idea of figuring out the purpose of this life is attractive. In my fundamentalist upbringing, this life was just a misery to be endured and nothing compared to eternity. In my apostate period, this life was all there is and devoid of inherent meaning. Either way, it seemed pretty pointless. This program suggests that we were created for God's pleasure, in the first instance, and that we are individually designed to utilize our particular talents and gifts to the benefit of our conspecifics. I will keep the imaginary readership posted as I go along.

I am also looking forward to contemplating eternity other than hell. When I was a kid, all we ever got to talk about or hear about was hell, and we glossed over heaven. I never had any good idea of what heaven was supposed to be like. I liked the version in Defending Your Life except for the reincarnation part. The heaven in What Dreams May Come was pretty cool, too, and reminded me of Tipler's virtual heaven in The Physics of Immortality.

I am toying with the idea of eternity as timelessness rather than just infinitley long time, in which case the resurrected self might well embody every moment of one's life all at once. After all, doesn't every moment exist forever as itself lost to us as our consciousness is washed along with the flow of time? If anyone out there knows, fill me in.