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A very old joke has been around since I was a campaigning atheist. It shows an excellent example of people's struggle with their existence. “No one is useless; you can always serve as a bad example.” As an atheist, I thought that line had a lot of meaning. I had no real goal in life. My atheist family had raised me to believe that what you lived for was to make a lot of money and have the power that money could bring. With that in mind, my father encouraged me to become a medical doctor. At that time, medical doctors did not have all the restrictions that are placed on them today. A person could make a lot of money by being a doctor, especially if you had a specialty.
What happened to me was that many of my peers in premed courses had a completely different reason for wanting to become doctors. Several of them wanted to go to a country where there were no doctors, and others wanted to work with sick children and homeless people. Their view of becoming a doctor was totally different from mine. They were highly motivated to study because they saw an essential purpose in their plan for life.
Then, I came in contact with some people who had made it big financially. They drove fancy cars, lived in nice homes, wore stylish clothes, and constantly had people fawning over them. One of them committed suicide. At the visitation, his family talked about how unhappy his life had been. His mother told me, “___ never saw a purpose in his life. Once he had something, he lost interest in it and started looking for something else.” I began to see that “things” did not give a person a life purpose, and I wondered what my purpose was.
Much to my father's disgust, I dropped out of premed, became a Christian, and decided to dedicate my life to serving children who needed someone to teach them. My father even had one of his friends, a professor in the university speech department, tell me that I could never be a teacher because I had a speech impediment. Students would not be able to understand me. During that time, I fell in love with a Christian girl I later married. She encouraged me to go into teaching and was willing to go with me to a high school that served kids in a ghetto in South Bend, Indiana. I taught there for 41 years. I had five preparations every day, one or two of which were inner-city kids, some of whom could not read and had been in trouble with the law. One semester, I had 13 kids wearing ankle bracelets. They had been removed from other classes to avoid causing trouble for other teachers. As they came into class the first day, one kid asked me, “What did you do that caused you to be stuck with us?”
Working with The University of Notre Dame and the National Science Foundation, I helped develop an investigative method of teaching science that did not depend on reading. My class contained kids in trouble and others with severe learning disabilities. All of them did very well with this new approach to learning based on evidence.
As time passed, I saw that high-level kids with faith problems could profit from the same technique. I began a class on evidence-based religious beliefs. It worked well with high school kids, and I was asked to use the same material with undergraduate college students. I realized I had another purpose — to show anyone who would listen that the evidence supports belief in God and the Bible as his Word.
So why am I alive? My answer is that God had a job for me to do. He also has one for you, but it may be different. When I tried other jobs for which I did not have the training or talent, I failed. Trying to fix my own car or get the mower working was a disaster. As I approach the end of my life, I see it as being full of purpose. I saw my father and my brothers struggle because they could not see the purpose God had for them. I could never do what they would have been able to do. Your purpose might not be in education. I have seen men and women who had secular jobs that, with a bit of tweaking, could be turned into great ministries and tools for good. Whatever you are good at can be turned over to the God who created you and has a purpose for your life. “God does not create any junk” is one of my favorite mottoes. You are special. Become a Christian and follow God's purpose for your life.
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Scripture links/references are from BibleGateway.com. Unhighlighted scriptures can be looked up at their website.