"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be," said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And God has given us the free will to choose our goals, to decide our values, to develop or not develop our gifts. God lovingly inspires us and offers guidance, but the labor of becoming our own selves is an intricate dance between God and us in which God allows us to lead.
For all of us, pursuit of our destinies means the pursuit of happiness. And while happiness means something different for each of us, if we think deeply about it, we would all arrive at happiness by including these choices in our lives: purpose, love, and spiritual fulfillment.
For today's Millennials (those born between 1977 - 1997) personal happiness is very much connected to finding purpose. And purpose means finding the fulfillment of a "dream job." Quite understandable: work has given human beings dignity since God gave the first couple a job description of responsibility for their environment in the Garden of Eden.
Job fulfillment is more important to the Millennials than it's been for any previous generation. 91% expect to stay in a job for less than three years and then move on. That equates to roughly 15 - 20 jobs over the course of their working lives.
Their rationale? Job hopping gives them the opportunity to experience a variety of roles and workplaces and 88% believe that "positive culture" at a workplace is important or essential to their dream job. Job hopping also allows them to develop new skills. After all, they know what economic and financial instability are; they have seen it affect their parents' lives; for some it's all they know.
The Millennials know that you can be working today and be without a job tomorrow. So they plan defensively. They consider themselves "free agents." And for them, an important part of the destinies they are creating for themselves is the happiness of finding purpose in job fulfillment.
Perhaps you don't agree with job-hopping. Certainly the companies that invest time and money to train these young people, only to lose them, aren't thrilled. Perhaps you're in a job that doesn't fulfill you but it's one you can 't leave.
But the Millennials' search for the "perfect" job leads us to consider these questions: Wouldn't it be wonderful if our culture would encourage people to choose their work for more than the amount of the salary? Wouldn't it be wonderful if people would be encouraged to choose jobs in which they'd also be able to find joy and purpose in the work itself, the challenge, the innovation, the effort? Wouldn't it be wonderful if sometimes we took risks and actively left one job to find another more fulfilling one?
If you can't find purpose in your job, then are you finding it in learning a new skill? In a creative hobby? Or in volunteer work that really helps others?
In addition to choosing our own destiny by finding purpose, Thomas Merton, reminds us that "Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another."
Many of us find our destinies of love in personal loving relationships. But all of us need other people besides a spouse, close friend, or partner. We all need to belong to loving communities which are also our support systems. In the past, large families provided this support. Today, churches, neighborhoods, schools, and friendship groups - even workplaces - are providing companionship, celebration, fun, security, direct help in times of trouble, and the challenge of new ideas and perspectives to help us grow.
So, choosing love also includes choosing the communities we belong to as important parts of our destinies. They help form us into the people we become.
Choosing one's destiny also means, in addition to finding purpose and finding love, making the choice for spiritual fulfillment. Psychologists can cite all the reasons we sabotage ourselves, sabotage our destinies, through immature selfishness, self-delusions and illusions, insecurity, and lack of self-worth.
Here is where God comes in: God gives us a secure self-identity - we are God's loved children, created for immortality. Through our loving relationship with God we are spiritually gifted by God with courage, love, hope, wisdom, endurance, creativity, and self-knowledge, all gifts that are our toolbox and our armor for finding out who we are, choosing our destiny, and pursuing our goals with unflagging enthusiasm.
But life has a way of changing our destinies. Alice Sebold says in her novel "The Lovely Bones" "Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never knew you had." This is the part of the dance where God can take the lead for a time by introducing us to new people or circumstances that polish and hone the person we are becoming. These unexpected fulfilled dreams give us a deeper sense of purpose, a deeper understanding of love, a deeper understanding of ourselves as spiritual beings.
Sometimes life takes darker turns: tragedies we could never have foreseen.
Injuries that disable us. Illnesses that will end our lives here sooner than we would have chosen. Eventually all of us age and our bodies are no longer capable of doing all that we used to do. God uses His partnership with us to make available all the hidden resources of His Graces and our character to polish us to brilliancy in purpose, love, and spiritual growth.
You choose the person you are to become, and in choosing your purpose, your loves, your ways to grow spiritually, you can rely on God to guide and sustain you every dance step of the way.