purpose

From Across the Net: “Help, I’m Exhausted by Social Media”

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Thankful for this piece by Stephen Altrogge:

“I get jealous. I want your calling. I want to do those fun, amazing, big, fast things. I want to do cool stuff for God. Quiet is boring. Mundane seems lame. I feel pathetic and purposeless.

Social media stretches me beyond my calling. It makes we want people and places and things that God has called you to, not me. I find these words of John Calvin to be helpful:

Each individual has his own living assigned to him by the Lord as a sort of sentry post so that he may not heedlessly wander about throughout life.

Your calling isn’t my calling, and if I try to take what’s yours, I’ll wander heedlessly through life. I’ll leave the places of good, fruitful, productive work God has staked out for me, and wander into wastelands instead.”

Read more here

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Sense of Identity

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I see many men walking around in mid-life with a sense of yearning for things they can’t get from their wives and can’t get from their jobs, and can’t pull from inside themselves. Having listened to thousands of stories in workshops around the world, I’m convinced that what men are missing is a sense of their own identity; a very primitive and very deep sense of validation that passes from father to son. – Gordon Dalbey

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From Across the Net: “Time well wasted”

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Justin, aka “Syp”, reflects on time in his piece titled “Time well wasted“.

I don’t want to hobble my personal and professional life with an overabundance of gaming. I hope that I always keep up the good fight of balancing that properly and not letting a hobby become a thing that becomes a master. I also desire to play games with purpose and not out of obligation and routine.

Dreams of Our Father

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My name is Jacob Ingalls, I write Confessions of a Tech Addict but this post doesn’t really fit into that form so Bryan was nice enough to let me post this on his site.

Over the last 2 days, I was at a Logistics and Engineering conference, which I generally dread going to every 6 months but this conference ended up being a bit different. This time around there were a couple other young professionals and doing what young people do in a sea of older people we found each other and had a few drinks after the first day of the conference ended. As we sat at dinner and swapped stories and proposed our ideas, one thing struck me, we were all seeking purpose but not in the way that our parents and grand parents had done. We all said we wanted to be successful but we weren’t sure we had it in us to do what it took to be wildly successful. We were all fairly certain that the 70-80 hour weeks that we have seen our bosses put in to get to where they were was really, honestly worth the effort. As the night went on, it became clear to me that we were seeking purpose and had no idea where to find it. Our generation and even the generation before it has no really overarching definition to it. Almost every generation since 1900 has had something that defined it, whether it be World War I & II, The Depression, The Cold War, Vietnam, The Space Race, but the current crop of 20-30 somethings don’t. We could be called the Internet generation but that has done very little to define us expect that we can text as the speed of light and change our relationship statues on Facebook. I look at my fellow 20 somethings and wonder if we could put a man on the moon before the end of decade, and I honestly don’t think we could, not because we’re not smart enough or don’t have the technology to do it, I just think we don’t have the wear with all to actually do it. From the hipsters to the junkies all the way up to the young corporate shot with her MBA, when I look at my generation all I see is a bunch of people who are already tired of this life at 26 and just waiting for the fulfillment that our 24 hour lives could hopefully bring.

@jacobingalls