Aligning My Purpose

In a powerful series of reflections embedded within meditation and prayer, I have encountered the challenge of asking myself: what is my purpose?

This is perhaps an opportunity to really highlight the wisdom of the Bible and how it came to be so sacred and inspiring for so many generations. It contains truth that can guide us at such a deep level and away from scary messages from society that unremittingly indicate that our worth and values are tied up with a purpose to survive and receive praise. My purpose was wrapped up in my unquenching thirst to be loved. It remains a struggle.

So not always knowing quite where to begin, I was reminded of a passage we studied in Bible school almost twenty years ago (at King's School of Theology, run at that time by Salt & Light ministries). It's from the prophetic book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. In the NIV it reads: "For the Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea." Sounds pretty awesome still, but first let's check out the English translation a little.

Our Bible studies "teach" us theological facts like "God is love", "God gives us his peace if we submit to his ways." But that kind of knowledge leaves the part it's supposed to impact the most specifically, our heart, almost completely untouched, on the edge, unaffected. The worries and fears of my mind are unaffected by this kind of "knowledge." What might help these mindsets - of which I am a direct descendant - are words like 'understanding' or 'awareness'. We could consider colliding them all somehow, Amplified Bible-style:

Knowledge

Understanding

Awareness

"...filled with a knowing and understanding awareness of ..."?

I think we can do better than that. Let's look at some of these words' traits.

Knowledge (stable but not pervasive, sensory or experiential)

Understanding (embracing)

Awareness (now, experiential, but temporal)

Let us attempt a return to 'awareness' and see how we might overcome its temporal limitations:

" ...filled with awareness of...". Without the article there is a greater feel of stability and transcendence to this quality of awareness. I also recall that sentences such as these in Hebrew can be understood in a progressive sense, i.e. the Earth shall be increasingly filled (until completion), which also plays against any worry of a "flash-in-the-pan" kind of awareness.

Moving onto "Lord" - we have long discussed on this blog how to better go about translating the Tetragrammaton in English and the deep-seated problems for Bible translation in maintaining allegiance to this medieval word. This was one of the pillars also for my presentation at the Bible Translation conference last October. The best option we found according to the dynamic method and the grammatical translation history was Eugene Peterson's "GOD". 

"Glory" is another interesting word. It is a bit religious sometimes, and I am not sure Christians always quite know what to do with it, but I feel it sometimes lacks the human response intended by the word, of awe and wonder at its beauty, light and power. I am using "glorious presence". I would also like to go further than waters simply "covering the sea". It sounds kinda cranky, and we can do bigger than "sea" as well. So I am choosing "engulfs the oceans." So here is my biblical purpose, embodied in my translation of Habbakuk 2:14:

For the Earth will be filled with awareness of GOD's glorious presence as the waters engulf the oceans.

I think that's a great common purpose. And it is in nature and it is in us. So deep, so good, breath, life. It makes a nonsense of my mental constraints on 'love'. And it breathes life into my values too. 

Firstly: Let life breathe. Express. Listen. Voice. 

Secondly: Rejoice. Flood.