Your Mission, Your Purpose

Mother Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality
by Raymond Arroyo

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"Who am I?" "Why am I here?" These fundamental questions, depending on the person, can take a lifetime to answer. As you might expect, Mother Angelica could answer them a lot quicker. Mission, purpose, and identity were bound together in Mother's thinking. She taught that it was far better to "find oneself" in proximity to God, than to attempt to do so separated from Him. After all, who knows the purpose of the creation better than the Creator?

Whether you are still finding your way in life or embarking on a new vocation, Mother has some guidance that will prove helpful now, and throughout the rest of your life.

The Christian Vocation

The Christian vocation is simple: you are first a child of God, and the state of life where God has placed you is the source of your holiness.

Your True Identity

Everybody is searching for their identity. But the real you only emerges when you are united to God. You need His grace, and without it you are stumbling in darkness. Everybody wants to know who they are, where they're going, and what they're doing. Yet the realism of Heaven and God, that invisible reality, never enters the equation. Identity is becoming. It's an understanding of who you are, and why you were created by God. You can only understand it by knowing Him, because He has a very special plan for you. And that special plan makes its own demand: that you be faithful - faithful to the duties of your state of life.

Finding Yourself

You can't isolate yourself and say you want to "find yourself no matter what anyone else says or does." You'll never find yourself that way. You'll find a grotesque creature that you are creating as you go along. God made you in His image. He redeemed you so that you could reflect that image to your neighbor.

Absolute Freedom

The thing that confuses us so much is that we are constantly thinking about ourselves: What am I going to do for the world? What am I going to do for my neighbor? You've got the wrong question.

The question is: What is God going to do through you? That's the question. How much are you going to let Him do? When you begin to ask the right questions you will get the right answers. You are nothing; and until you come to that realization, you will stumble and crawl through all of life. There is absolute freedom in the thought that you are nothing. Only then are you free to be used by God for His ends, the ends for which you have been created.

A Meditation On Your Creation

When I get a little discouraged in my own life, I like to make this meditation. I like to go back and visualize the Trinity before He created anything or anyone. Just God alone. In His mind, He knew everyone that He would create. And can you imagine God's eyes roaming over a possible 80 or 100 billion people who might have been. But they will never be. He passes them by, and suddenly His eyes rest on you. He says, "You shall be." Why you? Why me? If that were not enough, He placed you in a specific time, and of the billions of people on the planet only 1 billion would know His Son. And you were among that number. You must ask, "Why did You choose me, dear Lord, to know You and love You?" Because He loves you, and you can love Him in a way that no other creature in this whole wide world can love Him. You are that unique and special. Unless you understand this simple truth you will never love yourself or your neighbor.

The Big Mission

You have been chosen twice: first to be, then to know Jesus. What are you doing with that fantastic mission? You have been created by God and know Jesus for one reason: to witness to faith, and hope, and love before an unbelieving world. I don't care if the world knows you, or no one knows you. Even if you influence only one person in your whole life, God does not look at numbers or quantities. He looks at souls and individuals. If you were able, by your example or by one of your acts, to bring one person to heaven, it would mean more to Him than all the accomplishments on earth.

Copyright © 2007 by Raymond Arroyo.

About the Author

Raymond Arroyo, author of the New York Times bestseller Mother Angelica, is the news director and lead anchor of EWTNews. As creator and host of the news magazine The World Over Live, he is seen in more than 100 million households each week. He has worked at the Associated Press and the New York Observer, and for the political columnist team of Evans and Novak. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He lives in northern Virginia with his wife and three children.