How to Live a Life Richly Fulfilled
Pastor James Henri Cook describes how a clear vision transforms confusion into clarity and focuses one’s energies towards a meaningful purpose.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:8). Hope that emanates from an exciting, compelling vision for one’s future, turned into reality by goals and a plan to reach them, is the best antidote to much of what ails a person, a couple, a family, a business and a nation. A clear vision for one’s life turns the inner fog obscuring the path ahead into clarity; weaves separate strands of hope, dreams and talents into direction; and focuses one’s intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical energies into consequence.
To make the greatest difference for good in the lives of the most people for as long as one possibly can is the consequence that makes life the sweetest, the most satisfying, the most joyous. Consequence for good is the beacon on the horizon that forever draws the higher-purposed (John 15:12; Romans 12:10; Galatians 5:13, 6:10; Philippians 2:14).
Its light illuminates the path of the servant-pilgrim (Psalm 119:105). Its warmth is love, peace and joy radiated. Its brilliance animates the mind, setting its imagination asail on ships in the clouds. And its steadfastness on the solid Rock of Jesus Christ sets an immovable, unbreakable tenacity and solidity in one’s resolve and strength to weather whatever storms come along, overcome whatever terrors raise their heads out of the deep, and press though whatever discouragements beseige the mind.
To sail toward the horizon, always persisting toward that Light (John 8:12) gifts one’s soul with the only thing that truly enobles it and speaks the surpassing peace of “home”: to live a life loving and serving others – no matter what the “others” look like, believe in, stand for, who they love, how they vote or what they wear. Hurts, downcast eyes, dropped chins, tears, worry, strife, and wounds of the spirit as well as body impel the compassionate to his/her brothers’ and sisters’ sides without regard for what makes us different (Galatians 6:9).
Serving out of love for others isn’t like a travel deal offered by a hotel or airline with its fine print exclusions. Each person is precious beyond imagining simply because they are. Each hand that reaches up out of wave-tossed seas in distress is cast upward toward a Heaven that expects us to respond, to help, to sacrifice.
How we answer is who we are. Answering to the best of our God-given abilities is the essence of a life richly fulfilled (John 10:10).
~ Pastor James Henri Cook
