Honing Your ‘Why?’

Miranda Hart says that what is most important is not what we do, but why we do it. It’s important to ‘start with a why and live… life with purpose, on purpose’. Encouraging us to ‘hone your why’ she says her ‘why’ is:

‘To help people see who they are beyond the world’s rules and pressures and their own pasts. To set people free to be who they are made to me, so that the world is healthier and happier’

Wow! Three pre-honing thoughts for my ‘why’…

Yesterday we visited Inveraray Jail. We learnt about gruesome forms of punishment and deterrents used before the days of county courts and prisons. Visiting the nineteenth-century prison we saw what life was like for the real men, women and children – some as young as seven. We read actual stories of criminals who were tried and locked up there. We learnt that hopeless life situations often resulted in folks being repeat offenders…

We passed a ‘salmon ladder’. Salmon need to swim upstream during the breeding season. When there are manmade barriers like dams and locks, that would prevent this annual migration, an alternative ‘ladder’ is also created. A series of relatively low steps, that the salmon can leap over, enable them to travel upstream to their breeding grounds.

This morning I read the familiar words: ‘Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness… The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him…’

My pre-honed ‘why’ is about living hope and encouraging others to live in hope… folk imprisoned in apparently hopeless life situations from which there appears to be no escape…  swimming against the current, encountering huge obstacles, perhaps finding hope through taking smaller, manageable steps… pointing to a faithful compassionate God of hope.