Then Pharaoh said to his brothers, “What is your occupation?”
And they said to Pharaoh, “Your servants are shepherds, both we and also our fathers.” – Genesis 47:3
The Okinawa tribe in Japan has a reputation for unusual longevity. A community of very happy people with an uncommon sense of communality, it is not strange to find a 95-year-old Okinawan still going to his farm daily. And even though they eat healthy, their longevity is not primarily because of their diet. Every child is raised to understand that the collective is superior to the individual and no one exists for himself. They live like a real community of interdependent people because their lifestyle is anchored on the principle of selfless service to others. What concerns one concerns the collective. No one has a sense of entitlement beyond the reward he gets for serving others. No wonder they are very happy, and they live long.
Their lifestyle and communal outcomes have attracted attention from researchers and business moguls all over the world.
Their secret? IKIGAI. Ikigai is a combination of two Japanese words, “iki” which means “life” and “gai” which means “essence”. From the cradle, Okinawans raise their children with a sense of mission that is linked to the advancement of others through meaningful and significant contribution. So, the perpetual joy you see reflected in the face of the Okinawan simply derives from having made another person’s life better. Through the Okinawans, the world has come to know that the purpose of life is a life of purpose. The Bible established that a long time before the Okinawan found it out.
Purpose gives meaning to existence. Purpose justifies conduct. Your identity encodes your purpose and your purpose is the playback of your identity.
If it cannot bark, we cannot call it a dog. If it cannot write, why call it a pen? If it cannot hunt or roar, can we call it a lion? Whoever mistook a microphone for a toothpick?
The big question is, “Is it a lion because it hunts or it hunts because it is a lion?” Figure it out.
God never made anything He didn’t attach a purpose to. Neither does any serious creator. Even what God made but didn’t name, He gave a value code to. Lions aren’t carnivores because they are wicked, but because animal population in the ecosystem must be regulated.
Ikigai is not what we chose. Ikigai chose us.
Your purpose is not your making. It is your discovery as well as your path to recovery from despair.
Irrespective of how old you are, life only begins when you make that discovery. Your purpose is your ASSIGNMENT, the revealer of your contribution to creation.
Your purpose is the parameter for your ASSESSMENT. Government, parents, friends, society, education, a great job, may enhance your discovery, but none can find it for you. The discovery is along a lonely path you must travel, into the labyrinths of your Creator’s heart.
In the words of Albert Einstein, “every man is a genius. But when you assess a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it spends its entire life believing it was stupid.”
Your ikigai is the toolkit heaven has given you to fix the knotty issues of life. Experiences, whether good, bad, or ugly, only make sense when unscrambled with the toolkit of purpose.
Purpose is God’s mechanic for repairing life’s damage. If there is an elixir for indefinite preservation, it is your ASSIGNMENT.
Your assignment is your platform for demonstrating the character of your Maker to your world. It is your signature as gardener in the Eden assigned to you
Your purpose is not just your discovery. It is your RESPONSIBILITY to your Maker and your world. In it is the “vocation” (calling) you seek, guaranteed to fund the “vacation” you need.
If the world must give you its Goshen, it will ask the same question that Pharaoh asked Joseph’s brothers, “What is your occupation?” In simple terms, what do you bring to the table of the collective? Or are you just existing in the delusion that government and everyone else owes you an existence? You were never meant to be the world’s basket case, perpetually depending on what the whims of others give to you while you hardly give anything of value in return to others.
I have been asked many times if some people were created rich and some poor on purpose. I used to think that way too. Until I understood that nobody was born poor. Most of us don’t just know the platform of our “wealth” or we define wealth by parameters other than the Maker’s original intent
How about scriptures like “the poor you will always have amongst you?” Or, “labour not to be rich” or “the poor and the rich meet together, the Lord is Maker of them both.”?
These and many other scriptures have locked many into the self-limiting pigeonhole of poverty and lack.
God created abundance before he created Man. Man met no lack on earth when he was created. His problem with lack started when Eve focused on what the adversary told her was lacking (one tree) to the exclusion of what was in surplus (the other trees). Your adversary understands the power of focus because what you focus on keeps growing.
Purpose discovered, developed, properly connected and deployed has in it the store of provision you need to achieve it. The source provides the resource.
We may be broke and short of cash. But none of us has a money problem. What we have is a knowledge gap and perhaps, a cash flow problem. There is more money in the universe than man can ever spend, no matter the population. Purpose is self-perpetuating and for that reason, self-resourcing.
Most of the time, the problem lies in what we are chasing, cash! We may never have enough of that but we can never have a shortage of money, even if we lack capacity to translate it to cash.
Money and cash are not synonymous. Anything that can be traded for its value in a required form is money. Cash is just a denominator of money. No matter how cash-strapped you are, if you can find someone who has a significant problem that you can solve in exchange for what you require, you are not poor. Money is a representation of value. It can be tangible or intangible. God gives you a treasure of value, coded in your vocation, your problem-solving platform.
You have more money than you could ever need. Although I know that you may be currently struggling to pay your rent.
So, what is money? Money is what money buys. It is found everywhere under the sun. Cash may be scarce. But wherever there is existence, money is never scarce. For as long as you have something of value (time, commodity, service, solution) that you can exchange for its equivalent in rewards, you can never be described as poor. Your wealth is packaged in your value code. One man’s problem is another man’s harvest field.
Instead of constantly complaining about how tough things are, what is the problem you are currently solving for anybody that should warrant a significant reward? There lies your fortune.
Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!
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