"How to Find Your Mission in Life?"

TITLE: How to Find Your Mission in Life
AUTHOR: Richard Nelson Bolles
PUBLISHER:Berkely, Toronto: Ten Seed Press, 2005, (96 pages).

This little book gives a spiritual dimension to a world of job hunting and purpose finding. Using a pyramid that comprises 4 layers, the author explores the issues of the job-hunt. The lowest level deals with the question "What's happening?" The third level is about survival. The second level is about meaning and mission while the highest level is about effectiveness. At the very minimum, the spiritual director teaches us that we ought to have learned to make this world a "little richer" in our presence, and a "little poorer" in our absence. Bolles also cautions us that the book is not meant to be the only way. Neither is it primarily designed to be an intellectual exercise. Instead, it is to learn to remove obstacles that prevent us from finding our mission, and to take our search in stages.

Bolles states upfront our three missions in life.

1. "to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your mission is derived."
2. "to do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guiding of God's Spirit within you and around you."
3. The third mission is in three parts.
1. "to exercise that Talent which you particularly came to Earth to use - your greatest gift, which you most delight to use,"
2. "in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you the most,"
3. "and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world."

The rest of the book deals with thoughts about the three missions in life, beginning with right thinking, followed by right practicing, and then right living. Bolles ends with a priceless quote from CS Lewis.

"We now have a strong desire for living combined with a strange carelessness about dying. We desire life like water and yet are ready to drink death like wine." 

Bolles follows this up with an apt word, "We know that we are here to do what we came to do, and we need not worry about anything else." (61)

This nice little book is easy enough to read and provocative enough to spur us to action.

conrade