I’ve been befriending this guy at Menard’s on Mall Dr. I’ve talked to him three different times now and every time I see him he stops to talk. 

His name is...uh, at the moment I can’t remember his name. Shows you what good friends we are.

The first time I met him I said, “Eric, [I’ll call him Eric] what do you live for? What moves you? What keeps you getting out of bed every morning?”

And Eric says, “I want to save energy. I want to find a way to help our world become more energy efficient.”

And I said, “Well, that’s a nice mission. I can see value in that. Is that a mission you'd be proud of when you lay on your deathbed?”

This conversation continued and I tried to show Eric that his mission is definitely an honorable one, but if there is more to life than this, if there is an eternal state after we walk out of this one, then that’s an insane mission to live for. The last time I saw Eric was Friday night. “Hey, Eric!” I said. “Are you still living to make this world more energy efficient?”

“No,” he said. “I changed my mind. Now I want to become an aviation pilot.”

Somehow, Eric went from saving energy to using it up! We chuckled at the irony and then I shared how God gave me a purpose for living more pleasurable and meaningful than anything the world could offer: Jesus Christ. 

I later contemplated Eric's one week mission change. Eric’s purpose for living changes like Michigan weather because Eric has no basis or guide or direction for determining his mission for living. It could be rolling cigarettes (like this guy I see every Saturday at Biggby Coffee), or it could be studying the dynamics of jumping bugs. It could be saving the over 500 million people in Asian, African, and Latin American countries from what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty”, or it could be becoming the world’s fastest nose-hair clipper.

Without God, one's mission for life is as arbitrary as picking colors blindfolded. If I choose to live to become the richest man on earth (no hopes here!), in a godless world, who's to tell me that this decision is any less honorable than making my life mission to stop sex slavery? But if God created me to find my pleasure in Him, and if God proved my immeasurable value by crushing His own Son to set me free from my sins, I now have a way to distinguish a meaningful life mission from a pointless one.