I don’t want to get into the practice of writing about politics here. It’s too easy. It’s too emotional. It is the one place in the world where I can count on losing my center.

I studied Political Science in university. I went to the London School of Economics for a summer. I loved politics, and it just destroyed me emotionally. I am still trying to find a way to come back to it, where I can stay in my center, but I don’t really want to fight. So much of it is just fighting. I’m here to challenge people, but ultimately to make them happy. I’m provocative but not angry. Too much of politics today is a coliseum of fear. I don’t fight with fear. I fight with love.

On purpose

I meditate every morning. Before I write this. I move for a half hour to 45 minutes. I get my heart rate up and I just get warm. I sit outside. I see the deer in the morning and the hawks overhead. The red-bellied robins eat bugs next to my feet.

I do that to prepare myself to write, but also to clear my head, to become a hollow bone for whatever wants to move through me. I seek to be in service to God. I seek to be a servant of art and thought, of healing and Great Spirit. I seek to be a servant to something higher, to something greater than myself.

I cried about it last night even. I’ve been trying to figure out which Seminary to attend, gather why I’m attending, and what the end goal is. I’m working with a new Spiritual Director to try and decipher that. I don’t have many of the answers. And when I don’t have the answers, it feels like I’m twisted. Like someone is twisting me. I don’t know, just get me out. I cry to God to just tell me what to do. I just want to serve. How can I serve you?

Purpose as a commodity

I wasn’t always like this, though.

I used to be always asking, what is MY purpose. Me, me, me. Maybe MY purpose is to run a big company and be a CEO. Maybe I’m a painter. Maybe I’m like him or like her. Maybe I’m whatever next thing I’m seeing that seems HOT and COOL. I would cry about it in the same way. That twisting would overcome me. I couldn’t sit still without feeling like I was supposed to do big things. BE someone BIG. I was unhappy with everything I was doing and yet had no clear understanding of what to do instead. I thought everything was supposed to just feel GOOD. That finding the purpose FIRST would feel good, and THAT would motivate me to do.

We live in a world that has made purpose into a commodity. Hustle culture tells us to “find our passion” as though it’s some shiny gem we just haven’t dug hard enough for yet. And if you don’t find it? You must not be trying hard enough.

I had lots of ideas for businesses (I’m an ideas person), but never anything truly clear, truly attached to a greater design and need. Well, we could put this thing and this thing together and you’d get this new thing. That’s a lot of business (and mostly tech) today. It’s not really attached to anything with greater meaning. It’s just sort of an intellectual iteration on something else that we hope can extract some money or fill our time or teach us something on the way. It’s why the tech industry feels so soulless, in my opinion.

Then the algorithmic age takes it one step further. Purpose has to be a personal brand, a niche you can monetize, something tidy enough to pitch in a LinkedIn bio or spin into a TED talk. Therapy culture hasn’t saved us from it either. Now there’s even a new pathology: “purpose anxiety.” We’re stressed about not having one, or about having the wrong one, as though God is keeping score. But the truth is, that kind of purpose is hollow because it’s built on performance, not devotion.

It’s about doing

And now, years later, what I’ve really found is that purpose isn’t just something you spend a bunch of time THINKING about and magically you know it (so much anxiety in that). It’s not something you feel around in the void for. It’s not something you can iterate on a page with enough design thinking techniques.

It’s something you do.

It’s something defined by action. That calls itself a name only once it’s alive.

Purpose is birthed through the spark of inspiration plus the challenges of doing.

I used to think purpose had to be something like this: My purpose is to eradicate poverty by X percent by 20XX.

That’s fucking crazy. That simply isn’t a purpose for one person alone. That is an organizational-level purpose that I was trying to adopt as my personal mission, and then all the while, it’s not actually something in my heart. It’s just me looking for something to give me identity in the world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be loved. I needed to be healed.

Our culture confuses purpose with scale. We’re told if we’re not eradicating poverty by 20XX or building the next billion-dollar company, then we’re somehow failing our destiny. But that’s not purpose, that’s ego dressed in ambition. The holiness of purpose lives in small, daily faithfulness. In acts so ordinary they rarely get noticed. And yet, those are the very acts that change the fabric of our lives and communities.

For years, my search for purpose was really an identity project. Who am I? How do I get seen? What title makes me matter? That’s the twisted, restless feeling I lived with. The pressure to prove that I had a role worth applauding. But the shift came when I started to understand purpose not as self-definition, but as offering. What do I give? How do I show up? How do I let myself be shaped into something useful? That’s the real movement: from purpose as a mirror, to purpose as a vessel. From asking, “What can I become?” to asking, “What can I serve?”

Inspiration comes as whispers

It took me a long time to realize it’s not something big or crazy either. It’s just something meaningful. It’s raising kids. It’s writing. It’s loving a man well. It’s cleaning up your local creek when you see trash. It might be, if you’re really lucky or needed, a political and civil rights activist like Charlie Kirk, but it never starts out like that. It’s never guaranteed. It’s never seen and known from the beginning. The Divine won’t give you the whole picture.

But you have to be listening for the whisper.

Purpose almost always arrives first as a whisper. The whisper of Spirit, the whisper of the soul, nudging you to move. Asking you to be the one to call the congregation and let them know the pastor won’t be there on Sunday. To pick up a book and read it to your kid at night so they grow up knowing love and imagination. Bake bread for the neighbor who just lost her husband. These whispers don’t come with fanfare, they don’t announce themselves as capital-P Purpose. They are subtle, ordinary, often unnoticed, and yet they carry the whole weight of what it means to live.

Sometimes those whispers will grow into a roar, sometimes they won’t. That part isn’t up to us. What’s up to us is to simply listen and follow the call.

The one that says, go help with a food bank on Thanksgiving. The one that says, start writing daily.

The paradox of purpose

And then, easier than you think, it’s actually whatever you’re doing at the time you’re doing something. Guess what? That means you already have your purpose. You’re in it right now. Whatever that shape of it is.

I used to think I had to ‘get to my purpose’. Like I wasn’t already doing it, and it was far away from me, and I had to find it.

When in reality, I was already in it. I was learning. I was healing. I was seeking. That is your purpose at any one time. My purpose is to learn. My purpose is to heal. My purpose is to seek answers about the mysteries of the cosmos. What a HUGE purpose that is!

The paradox of purpose is that it’s never as far away as we think, AND it’s also never fully arrived. It’s both the thing we are already doing — healing, learning, growing — and the thing we are always becoming through our action and devotion. You don’t graduate into purpose, you live into it. 

So it’s both, I’m seeking answers of the cosmos, and _________ that I will be.

Which means the very ache to “have one” is often a sign you’re already in it. The longing is part of the work. The incompleteness is part of the becoming.

My purpose is to serve. My purpose is to care. My purpose is to radiate love in all interactions. My purpose is to do what I say I’m going to do and to grow, constantly and consistently, into a better, more loving, more intelligent human being.

And guess what? That’s enough.

And again, purpose, truly, is only found through doing.

It’s only found through actualizing your gifts over time. Through following that little light. We think the light is supposed to look really big and bright and guide us to it like a moth in the dark.

But purpose is more like swimming from the bottom of the ocean up, with only the light of the moon. You can see some light, it flickers through the waves and the ripples, but you don’t know how long you have to go. The tide moves the light so you can focus on it one moment and lose it the next. You’re not sure how long you can hold your breath.

When we look at purpose that way, we understand it as a becoming.

Purpose is defined through struggle. Through suffering, even.

It’s a daily choice of choosing the things that define you, like forming a sculpture out of marble. Through what you believe and what you do, the statue of you is formed.

It’s choosing to take that small light of inspiration, from down in the depths of the ocean, with your breath held, and say, let me just try.

Love,
Val

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