Dr. Peter J. Weiss

What pur­pose does God have for you in your present cir­cum­stances?

What does God seek to accom­plish through you now?  Two good ques­tions.  I’ve been reflect­ing on them since my pas­tor ended last weekend’s church ser­vice with these words:

“Wher­ever you go, God is send­ing you, wher­ever you are, God has put you there; He has a pur­pose in your being there. Christ who indwells you has some­thing He wants to do through you where you are. Believe this and go in His grace and love and power.”

Richard C. Halver­son

This is known as the Halver­son Bene­dic­tion in honor of its orig­i­na­tor, Richard C. Halver­son, for­mer Chap­lain to the United States Con­gress.

Now I’ve been hear­ing this bene­dic­tion or some­thing close for years, but I also mis­un­der­stood it for quite a few of those years.

For a long time the ques­tion I asked myself after hear­ing this was, “What does God want me to do?”

Mean­ing, what exactly does He want me to do in this job, in this fam­ily, in this town, etc.?

This line of ques­tion­ing didn’t work out so well.

For exam­ple, as CEO of a health insur­ance com­pany, I felt God’s pur­pose to be help­ing our mem­bers become phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally healthy.

How­ever, I found myself over­whelmed with the demands of sim­ply run­ning the firm and unable to imple­ment my desired well­ness pro­grams.  It was so frus­trat­ing!

One evening, hear­ing the preacher speak those words yet another time, I had a sud­den flash of insight!

Wait a minute; he’s not say­ing that God wants me to do some­thing.  He’s say­ing God wants to do some­thing through me!  Imme­di­ately, I felt that God’s “some­thing” was chang­ing my char­ac­ter.

Wow!  All of a sud­den it made sense.  Frus­tra­tion can be very help­ful in chang­ing char­ac­ters.

I began to see God’s pur­pose in my sit­u­a­tion as help­ing me to develop love, patience, tol­er­ance and peace.  I learned that life isn’t all about climb­ing the cor­po­rate lad­der to have greater author­ity and a big­ger salary.

And I had a chance to clar­ify my val­ues and solid­ify my com­mit­ment to them and to God.

I’m sure I made a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to the firm, but as I look back now, I truly believe that my own emo­tional and spir­i­tual growth were the main pur­poses of my being there.

Per­haps this rings a bell.  Maybe, like me, you’ve been try­ing to dis­cern a God-given mis­sion to “do some­thing” when, in fact, God sim­ply wants to change you on the inside.

I believe that this is what God wants most for every­one, because when you change on the inside, the follow-on pur­poses will take care of them­selves.

It does require real effort to grow emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally, but few things are more impor­tant.

I don’t know if your min­is­ter uses the Halver­son Bene­dic­tion, but I really like it now. You might say it speaks to me.  Hon­estly though, I’m not sure about the “wher­ever you are, God has put you there” part.

Some peo­ple are in some pretty bad places.

Did God put them there?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I do believe “that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28), and some ben­e­fit can come out of even the most dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions.

Med­i­tate on Halvorson’s words.  Ask God to show you how good can come from your sit­u­a­tion, and don’t for­get that God’s good may well come from you work­ing on your­self.

You can do it.