If you are like myself, and I assume you are, having a purpose in life is kinda what it all seems to be about. From "what's the purpose" to "what's my purpose", it tends to niggle at us in the background of our lives.
When we came "into the truth" back in the day, we found purpose. Not only did we find purpose, but we found a God given purpose. The Book told us that, as the chosen ones in the exact true church, our purpose was to become Kings and Priests and of course, go us therefore into all the world telling everyone else they could be too.
For better or worse, in hindsight, worse, I felt my purpose was to go into ministry. At first it wasn't WCG ministry as I had been accepted at another seminary in New York before choosing WCG that in my mind was more accurate. So, my purpose was to go there and become a pastor. While GTA announced the first student forum that "if anyone here thinks they came here to be a minister, get that idea right out your head!", I thought to myself, "We' see..." I didn't' understand then that God would decide who was the to be in ministry of WCG through the wisdom and leading of the Holy Spirit of the "Manpower Committee". I guess that "we'll see" thing followed me through AC and the WCG. When my fourth year public speaking teacher announced "No one gets and 'A' in my class," "We'll see" thinks I and I made him retract that by getting an 'A'.
All this because I had found my purpose. Of course, be careful what you wish for as I had no clue what was to follow over the next two decades of fulfilling my purpose in life.
One personal note. When I was told I was going into the ministry I called my dad to tell him. He got real quiet and I could tell he got teary, which I had never seen my dad ever do. I asked if he was, ok? He said, "You know, when we had your brother (my only brother is blind, deaf and cannot speak from birth trauma and being born at 6 months weighing 1.5 lbs.,) I told God that if he gave me a healthy normal son, that He could have him." (Questionable results I know :) Well, first I heard of that! No pressure there but I had purpose so obviously God made my dad a Diehl, err...deal. I think this one conversation kept me in WCG ministry longer than my heart was actually in it not wanting to disappoint my dad or remove purpose form his own perceptions of his life and family.
Gerald Waterhouse showed up every year or two to tell us all even more about our "God given purpose". It was to follow "Mr Urmstrong", who of course, would never die before the Jesus returned. I did ask him what he'd do when, not if, Mr Urmstrong, died? He said "I'll believe it after three days and three nights!" Ugh....hopeless. His God given purpose was getting really old and very annoying for me personally. I'm not sure it had not always been annoying to me personally when he showed up and I do recall telling him that he caused me more problems with the members than helped them. All he said to that was "really?". Yes, really. God given purposes are like that.
As the years of scandal, BS and authoritarian control rolled on I convinced myself for a time that my God given purpose was to have come to the ministry "for such a time as this". I thought I was there to stop the majoring in the minors and help the church grow up. Wrong! I failed to understand just how many first- and second-generation ministers were waiting to come up with their own God give purpose and either take over the church when HWA died or simply start their own version as the loons, Gerald Flurry, Rod Meredith, Dave Pack and many others did.
Dave Pack is about as foolish and stupid a man believing in his own version of his God given purpose as it gets. I thank Marc Cebrian for exposing in the details what a foolish shepherd the guy is. Foolish, stupid, ill-trained in theology, delusional and not a little dangerous as he pretends to have his own version of a God given purpose.
All this to say, that I have come to accept that one does not need a purpose to live life, learn all one can and exit. I don't need or even want a "God given purpose". I can't speak for anyone but me and in my own experience, but I have concluded that the most dangerous people on the planet are those who claim to live their lives with a God given purpose. Nothing but trouble especially if they insist that your God given purpose be identical to theirs with "send it in" attached for good measure.
Those who claim a "God Given Purpose" have done most all of the most horrible things on the planet both in history and to this day. The concept of being "God's chosen people" doesn't help either.
If one is not careful, life here in the now becomes less important and life in the fuzzy future more important. For some, as it is said, "Some people are seeking the heavenly such that they are of no Earthly good". The Book tell us "the day of death than the day of one's birth." (Ecc 7:1). You can miss your entire life if that becomes your "God given purpose". I believe is one follows that path too obsessively "woulda, coulda and shoulda" will rear their heads somewhere down the line and regrets will pile up and infect the life we actually have.
I have become comfortable with being just a very small part of "life" and have my own personal experience of what some say is the Universe observing itself." That's enough purpose for me at this stage. I think most know I am not a believer in the Biblical story any longer. That is the result of my own questions, observations and studies about the Book. Your experience may vary as I am sure it does.
I did not know I did not exist the first 13.87 billion years before I showed up and I can "live" returning to that state when the time comes. I have no God given purpose to "make it into the Kingdom" or "do everything I can to avoid the Lake of Fire, which I have been consigned to many times in the past 20 years by those with their own God given purposes.
I had my DNA mutations outline my genetic trip out of Africa a few years back around 60,000 years ago. It only took one person between me and those genetic ancestors who either ducked or didn't duck to not lead to me. The chance of you being you today is pretty remote.
So I just wanted to share the two concepts that have brought me to making peace with my personal and original "God given purpose" gone awry.
While I have long ago gotten over following anyone else's path or purposes, I do recognize words of wisdom on the topic. These two views resonate with me. I don't expect it to resonate with many because many find fear of death or "what's going to happen to me" is much stronger than just accepting this present moment and experience leaving the rest up to reality and what actually is.
So for those so inclined at this stage in all our lives and with having had all our own experiences with the WCG experience, both as members and ministers...
Gotta go climb Larch Mountain in the Columbia Gorge. Ride here. Sorry is you find typos :) My heart was right!
THE MOST ASTOUNDING FACT
19 comments:
Yet "The Purpose-Driven Life" became one of the most popular books of recent years. And it was written by a Baptist preacher.
It was that disgusting Purpose Driven Life book by Rick Warren that finally facilitated my exit from organized religion. We had been attending a local evangelical church after we left WCG in 1998, but they started to base their sermons on various books such as PDL and other so-called Christian publications. I simply couldn't stomach any of it, and one Sunday at a church service when I was attending by myself, I walked out in disgust and never returned. I haven't abandoned my faith, but organized religion is no longer a part of my life. My wife hadn't been all that keen on church attendance anyway, and she never went back either.
Seeking purpose is probably more in our nature than not. The problem seems to be we come up with purposes we ascribe to deities in origin and in that cause nothing but problems for those who are not so inclined to the same purpose. Add to this the idea of the "one true purpose".... well you know :)
Dennis is sounding increasingly like a nihilist here and elsewhere.
An interesting "how I spiritually lost my way and ended up in the lake of fire" by Dennis Diehl.
Sounds like a "feel good" purpose driven life. Good luck with that.
Congrats! Staying home from church can save you 10, 20,30% or more! :)
Dennis:
You and I have very different backgrounds. I came to the WCG as someone who is bi-racial. While God-as-God-is-God was preached, it applied to me in a rather oblique way in Armstrongist theology. Armstrongists believe in Bi-theism and Subordinationism. This view had broad implications for how God purposed the lives of people. This theology asserts that God and Jesus are two completely separate beings. And, further, that Jesus in his essence, though God, is inferior to God the Father in his essence.
This opens the door for the Kingdom of God to be a rigid hierarchy that values some and not others. An AC Pasadena graduate told me he was taught in class that the hierarchy that existed in the church was the hierarchy that would exist in God’s government in the Kingdom. The ministry would continue to rule over the lay membership. Then, there was Dean Blackwell who went around the country preaching White Supremacy. His shtick was that Israel would rule over the Gentiles nations in the Kingdom of God and based this on a mistranslation of a scripture in Genesis. So, some people had a big purpose and other people had a little purpose. As someone bi-racial, I was a little-purpose person and was treated like that in various WCG venues. And when I left Armstrongism and became a Christian, I was liberated from these highly discriminatory views and policies. You found the whole purpose thing burdensome and I found it to be something from which I was excluded. I was just church trash. WE have very different experiences and perspectives.
The Cosmos is not random and chaotic. It is something that has definable behavior. Science delves into this behavior all the time. Because the Cosmos is non-random, this does not permit us to deduce immediately that the Cosmos is teleological. But then there is other data that must be brought into consideration. It is a lengthy exposition and I cannot address it here. Besides, it has been addressed adequately by others like Professor John Lennox.
I understand your perspective and experience as a bi-racial person. Of course to me, you would just a person like all other persons and I would not typically have seen you as anything but yourself. The color issue is an ignorant construct humans have come up with based on the amount of sun protecting melanin humans lost as they journeyed out of Africa to Stockholm :)
I was completely naive to the deeper racism in WCG in the late 60's as a yet to be "converted" Dutch Reformed kid. Once in the ministry, I began to see and hear how some of my peers thought and found it disconcerting to say the least. I have related how my first WTF came up when just 18 in Rod Meredith's first year Bible where he announced that "There is God, Christ, Herbert Armstrong, Garner Ted Armstrong, MYSELF and a few other leading Evangelists....", who of course he did not name once he got to himself. It was my first "uh oh" moment but then I forgot about it as that was not how I would ever think about such things. As long as it was not something I had to believe or feel or no one was forcing it on me, I could keep moving forward. I really would have openly and vocally rejected any attempt to indoctrinate me.
with such nonsense.
I am a science guy and draw my personal inspiration from cosmology. I can spend hours behind a telescope. I had to leave my 10 inch Reflector behind when I moved to Portland but still have my huge astronomical binoculars that when mounted provide each eye with a four inch refractor. Pretty awesome views.
Thanks for responding. I am no longer surprised that many who bother to post speak nothing of the actual post but decide to judge, label and even cosign me to eternal difficulties for sharing and expressing my personal experiences and lessons learned perspectives. It has always been like that for me here on Banned.
I found myself in search of purpose once I left WCG following the Great Disappointment of 1975. Having been a technically orientated person, and realizing it early in life, I never found the purpose spoon fed to me by my parents and the Armstrong empire to be meaningful, satisfactory, or applicable in my case. Once I realized how bogus my WCG programming had all been, I decided to feed the activities which brought the most positive results and paybacks into my life. I'm one of the guys who has a compulsion to fix the things that others utilize to make products and put food on their families' tables. It is very rewarding because very few people have the knowledge and ability to do the specific things which I can do, nearly effortlessly, on a daily basis. There is not only the satisfaction in keeping the equipment running properly, but an opportunity to be a hero for some individuals every single working day. Like an EMT, only for machinery instead of people. To me, this is far more fulfilling than learning to exercise power over people and to rule with a rod of iron. Money is paid to me, but it is often completely irrelevant compared to the sense of fulfillment which I derive from each completed project, and the knowledge of what my God-given talents brings to peoples' lives.
To me, this is a much more functional relationship a human can have with the rest of creation than anything Armstrongism could ever impart. It may sound like ego, but it is really not. It is simply the symbiosis I get to enjoy with all that surrounds me. It's why I continue to do it every day at age 76.
Thank you for sharing. I also am a caretaker by nature, thus the ministry perhaps in part. I was an EMT Intermediate, just short of paramedic during my time in ministry in SC. The concept of "I can't help what has happened, but I can help what happens next" gave me the kind of value you felt. I also learned very quickly that no matter what I saw, and it was much, I could remain calm, focused and apply my skills to some of the worse things humans get themselves into. However, it was stressful in the sense that one false personal move and the company acted like it never knew you. Kinda like WCG lol. So I finally landed in Therapeutic Massage where the caretaker in me found a more positive environment.
Beware the past pushers who dwell and portray themselves as great victims of circumstances, great victims of the long dead past villians of WCG. Always the victim never the hero. Yet they fail miserably to move forward. They don't want to move forward. Always dragging the church back never forward. Always dragging the church down, down, down to the physical but never up to the spiritual.
The dwell up to their ankles in the misery of the past. Beware. They talk only of the past and never of God. Never forgetting to portray their experiences as victims but never doing anything about it at the time. They stood for nothing, stopped nothing and only soaked in the events to become talkers of misery, not talkers of God. No glory, no honor, no aspect is given to God by these people, they brought only idolatry to the brethren in their youth and in their old age only bring godlessness.
Beware them they are everywhere.
Dennis:
I am going to take philosophical turn. I understand your perspective. A cultic organization usurped the concept of God-given purpose to extend their control over those who were unfortunate enough to let them into their lives. All of us exiters have been there and done that and bought the T-shirt. And, further, you have concluded that you don’t really need a majestic purpose to live.
But there is something more elemental here. We are, all of us human beings, by nature seekers of The Good. By “The Good” I mean the grand and noble idea of Good that benefits the Cosmos. It is good that benefits humans, plants, animals, soil and all else within our purview. This is our purpose at its lowest common denominator. Even people who are bad are seekers of Good. Hitler, in destroying the Jews, by some malformed calculus thought he was doing Good for the German people. His seeking behavior was wholly functional; he was just delusional about what Good actually is.
I believe this volitional seeking of Good is something that we are endowed with by being made in the image of God. The idea of Good is intelligible to us. Humans are unique in the volitional seeking of Good. It is something that we pour our creative talents into. (I am not naïve. I know that humans also invent evil things. But this is like Hitler mentioned above. And animals in their quest for survival may do what we might label good.) And this desire for Good is the “handle” that God grabs to bring about our conversion, now or post-mortem.
In fact, I think that the seeking of The Good is really the only thing that most people who are not believers know about God. And when they seek The Good, they unknowingly walk close to God.
Scout
6.35 am. Your comment is the ol' one-two. Blame the victim and take on the role of the victim. The goal being of getting the victims to suspend moral evaluation. Christ didn't suspend passing moral judgment when He criticized the Pharisees. He called His generation an evil generation.
Yeah. That's what happens to people who fall into the total shit of HWA/WCG/AC. It is actually the exceptional person who can leave it all and recover normalcy.
Whose fault is that? Certainly not the victims'.
Not people 2:36 put your reading glasses on. And keep your vile swearing to yourself.
you condemn those who were harmed by the falsehoods of Armstrong, and fact is this church can never be redeemed nor should it as it was lead by a satanic spirit and the vanity of the fake apostle
''..the hierarchy that existed in the church was the hierarchy that would exist in God’s government in the Kingdom..''..
and what a farce that would be and we thank God their silly ideas count for nought. Good to read how you are now living a Christian life regards to you
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