Find purpose amid life’s bustle

    Too often our routines become monotonous and meaningless. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way we go through our lives: we wake up, go to work or school, return home and fall asleep.
    This semester, I’m particularly feeling the monotony of my schedule. Preparing for a new class and beginning work on my dissertation, I originally thought I would have more free time since I’m only auditing a class. Not so. Preparation takes more time than I had expected and researching lasts awhile, simply because I keep finding great avenues for thought.
    So, what happens? I return home, only to continue working, and I’m exhausted at the end of the day. Even the regular question to my husband – “How was your day?” – seems to be pointless. We both know that the question is only a nicety and that our answers will be the same: “fine.”
    Talking over lunch with a fellow graduate student, who is a wife and mother of two small children, we both acknowledged that the daily grind is truly a grind: we grind to such a halt that everything seems routine. We even see this in our church attendance: we go to a particular Mass at a particular time, and we usually pray with memorized lines, the words literally spilling out of our mouths, with hardly any thought at times.
    I was surprised, then, to hear in a recent homily the question, “Why do we attend church?” The pastor launched into what seemed like a free, indirect discourse from my lately bothered thoughts.
    Rather than paying attention to Mass, I often found myself thinking about all the things I had left to do and how I could more efficiently get work done. “Do we feel like our issues are more important than the needs we see around us,” asked the pastor? I probably blushed from embarrassment as he asked that question. “Are we there for ourselves, or are we there because we want God to use us in our church community?”
    I left Mass mulling over that question: What did he mean by whether or not we wanted God to use us? And then it hit me: We are meant to be instruments that are tuned by God to achieve our purpose, the plan that he has created for us. How often we forget that!
    Perhaps the forgetfulness of this message is what causes such deep ruts in our lives. If we continually go about our routines, thinking only about ourselves and everything we have to get done, we forget that we are all called to a higher purpose. We forget that we are meant to be givers, that we are meant to have other roles in our lives besides our isolated, selfish, me-centered roles.
    That night over dinner, I talked over the message that I had heard from the pulpit with my husband. He remembered during our pre-Cana, and in our wedding homily, our marriage vocation: to continually help each other get to heaven. Somewhere along the line, we let that message slide in favor of the hustle and bustle of life.
    So, I think that we can ask ourselves the same question that my pastor asked us: Why do we fulfill certain roles in our lives? Why did we choose a particular career path, a particular life vocation? Was it for ourselves, or for the greater good that we could do for those around us?
    I’m not going to be asking the same old questions anymore and continuing in the same old routines. I’m going to learn how to ask better questions, questions that tell my spouse and friends that I truly care about them and that I want to know about them.
    Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at [email protected]