What Is My Purpose in Life?
Our lives have purposes because the good creation in which we live depends on purpose. The patterns that enable us to live exist only because meaning imbues creation. We are products of the rationality that inheres in creation, while also beings that by reasoning increase creation’s order. Your purpose is thus to look around you for that which lies just within your furthest reach, in your best imagination of what glorious order you might celebrate and by doing so enhance. Your purpose is to breathe in creation’s logos spirit, to act out your highest vision of the loving creator whom creation celebrates. You may find that purpose to be in the sacrificial care of your child, parent, or sibling, the striving you undertake to provide for your spouse and yourself, or the real or figurative song you sing that makes creation shimmer with the creator’s glory. Look around you to reach with the confidence, ambition, and strength that the creator grants you, for as long as you draw breath, knowing that your reward will follow as surely as time passes.
Read more of how to find your purpose in “Who I Am,” available in paperback or digital.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Can I Advance in My Job?
Every worker has a right and interest to seek advancement. But not every worker deserves or has an opportunity to advance. Advancement generally begins with improving your job knowledge, skills, and ethics, until you demonstrate mastery of your current position and the ability to take on the next challenge. You may then need to express, to your supervisor, unit manager, and human resources, your interest in advancing, not just claiming a promotion but moreover showing your willingness to volunteer for extra work and to qualify for promotion through steady job growth. Learn the next higher positions available through your employment, and let your employer know that you are pursuing the education, training, license, or other qualifications and credentials for those positions, even before the positions open. When higher positions for which you qualify open, apply, even if your employer already has a preferred candidate. Keep at it, because you may be next in line.
Read more about job advancement in “Help with Your Job,” available in paperback or digital.
Am I in the Right Career?
You can generally follow several indicators to know whether you’re in the right career. If your career is providing for you and your family, while allowing you to participate meaningfully in family life while maintaining your good mental and physical health, then you have good reasons to believe that you are in the right career. If you, your family members, and your community and friends respect your work enough to give you a good reputation and sound standing among them, all the better. Look also at how productive, creative, and engaged you are in your career, and whether your employer values your work sufficiently to reward you amply and grant you reasonable job security. If those things are working well, too, even better. Yet everything may be going swimmingly for you in your current career, and you still might sense an appropriate call to a different career. Or things may be going poorly for you in your current career, and you still might sense that you’re in the right place and just need to stick it out. Yes, judge your career on objective indicators. Don’t be foolish. But listen for the creator’s call that might tell you either to up and move from a good career to a challenging new one, or conversely not to give up on a currently challenging career because it’s still exactly your right place.
Read more about how to choose and assess your best career in “Help with Your Career,” available in paperback or digital.
How Can I Better Manage My Money?
Lots of sound strategies go into managing your money well. But at the root of it, managing your money well has very much to do with knowing where you stand relative to your money at all times. If you’re only guessing how you are doing financially, then you’ve already lost. If you don’t know right now, then something is very likely amiss, whether your weekly expenditures, debt ratio, savings trend, investment returns, financial risk management, or retirement planning. So, to know where you stand with your money at all times, you need just two basic financial documents. One is a budget. Yes, love it or hate it, a budget showing how much you are spending against how much you should be spending. That’s half your battle, the daily grind of finances. The other financial document you need, though, to tell you where you truly stand with your money is a balance sheet showing you the value of everything you own against the value of anything you owe, and the quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year trend in your net worth. Get a budget and balance sheet in place, and keep an eye on both, and you’re on your way to managing your money into better security and greater wealth. Have at it.
Read more in “Help with Your Money,” available in paperback or digital.
How Can I Improve My Marriage?
Anyone who has married knows the desire to improve their marriage. You and your spouse may be at rock bottom and badly in need of improving your marriage. But then again, you and your spouse may be doing pretty well together yet believe that you could do even better. You likely can. First, take an inventory of some of the big things, like how you’re doing together with your decision whether to have kids or how to raise them, your educations, your jobs or careers, your finances, and your relationship with your parents. You may have things on which to work together in each of those areas, to improve, refine, adjust, and agree. You may also need to work together on retirement savings and plans, helping one another through disability, and even anticipating the passing of one or both of you, while providing for your children, grandchildren, and legacy. You may also need to learn better ways to reduce your marital irritations and manage your marital conflicts. But while any one of those issues can be driving or holding the two of you apart, the one area on which to deeply focus is your care for one another. You must each develop an ever-greater capacity to care for one another, including time, attention, interest, respect, loyalty, appreciation, and commitment. You may benefit from learning to exercise, adventure, pray, and worship together. Hold continually before one another the desire to improve your marriage, as among the greatest of all possible ambitions.
Read more in “Help with Your Marriage,” available in paperback or digital.
How Do I Navigate Divorce?
Only in the rare case of the parties’ complete and civil agreement on everything is navigating divorce relatively straightforward. The more issues that you must resolve with your spouse, including the big four of child custody, child support, spousal support, and property division, the more help you’ll need. And the more that the two of you disagree, especially emotionally and irrationally related to the natural hurt of divorce, the more you’ll need the help of a court. So, first make a sound judgment about just how much you and your spouse have to decide, how important those issues are to you, and how civilly and fairly the two of you can go about deciding those issues. If you see storms on that horizon, promptly retain a reliable divorce attorney with a good reputation, while asking around and checking references. If you can see that you’ll struggle, then build a team of supporters around you beyond your attorney, such as parents, adult siblings, close friends, and a pastor and counselor. Care for yourself with your diet, rest, and exercise, and of course care for your children. The technical court processes of divorce will help you work everything else out.
Read more from start to finish in “Help with Your Divorce,” available in paperback or digital.
How Do I Start a Small Business?
Forming a limited liability company (LLC) is a good way to put some structure in place around your dreams and plans of starting a small business. Most businesses benefit from a corporate structure. Banks and suppliers may require it to open accounts. Forming an LLC requires little more than choosing an available name after an online search of your state’s corporations bureau, filing a simple form with the bureau while paying a modest filing fee, getting a free taxpayer identification number (EIN) online from the IRS, and adopting an operating agreement from online templates, an online service, or a local attorney. Just going through those steps will help you confirm your commitment to start, will give you new initiative and momentum, and will enable you to open a business checking account and entertain other business commitments. If you change your mind, you’ve lost almost nothing, you may have learned a few things about your dream, and your LLC will be there for you in the future when you decide to move forward.
Read more about forming an LLC and getting started with it in business in “Help with Your LLC,” available in paperback or digital.
How Do I Start a Charitable Nonprofit?
Starting a charitable nonprofit can be the realization of a dream. It can also take some genuine commitment to jump through the many hoops to get everything in place, including IRC 501(c)(3) tax exemption. Starting your charitable nonprofit and qualifying it as tax exempt need not take a lot of money. But it will take some real thought and time. The first step is to file articles of nonprofit incorporation with your state corporations bureau, including the IRS’s required limiting language for tax exemption. You then appoint nonprofit directors and adopt bylaws, again including IRS tax-exempt language. You’ll need a free IRS taxpayer identification number (EIN) available online. Then you’ll need to open an online IRS account to complete the appropriate online version of IRS Form 1023. Your Form 1023 will need a narrative description of activities, fundraising plan, and budget for the next three years. Get all that and other information correctly in place on your Form 1023, pay the IRS its fee, and some weeks later you should get your tax exemption letter. Then, you’re off to fulfilling your charitable dream. And good not only for you but for the many individuals whom your new 501(c)(3) charitable organization may serve.
Read more about forming a charitable nonprofit in “Help with Your 501(c)(3),” available in paperback or digital.
What Historical Figures Can Inspire Me?
History offers so many fascinating figures whose lives can inspire and transform us today. Those figures stretch from the ancients like Hammurabi and Homer, and biblical friends like Abraham and Daniel, to the medieval Boethius and Aquinas, the Renaissance Petrarch and Grotius, Europeans like Goethe and Pascal, English like Drake and Chesterton, Russians like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, Americans like Lieber and Ringling, and moderns like Jung, Hepburn, and Mandela. While any one great figure from the past may inspire endlessly, when we survey a full range of figures across the millennia, we sense both the grandeur of endless possibility and the sweet pull of eternity for every mundane one of us. We also see the steady outline of the single grand narrative that draws us all together into one humanity, blessed with the image of divinity. Know your history, and know history’s great biographies. You breathe the same sweet air of divinity.
Read more in “Fifty Transformative Figures,” available in paperback or digital.
