If you feel that you are living out your life's passion (purpose), please share with me how you got there ?

Answer 1

I talk with thousands of people and ask what they do.

I eventually find that many are willing to tell me how they feel about the progress in their life.

In realizing that no two people I've talked to are the same......I relax and assume that my path will also be unique.

I work hard and I try to be friendly and caring. I try to be a good steward within my family and community. My prayers are usually a big "THANK YOU" rather than an asking-session.

I figure that my "purpose" is very closely related to what the sum of my life is, at this point.

I reflect on this poem by Rumi, often:




Jesus on a Lean Donkey



Jesus on a lean donkey,
this is an emblem of how the rational intellect should control the animal-soul.

Let your spirit be strong like Jesus.
If that part becomes weak, then the worn-out donkey grows to a dragon.
Be grateful when what seems unkind comes from a wise person.

Once,a Holy Man, riding his donkey, saw a snake crawling into a sleeping man's mouth!
He hurried, but he couldn't prevent it.
He hit the man several blows with his club.
The man woke terrified and ran beneath an apple tree with many rotten apples on the ground.

"Eat! You miserable wretch! Eat!"

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"Eat more you fool!"

"I've never seen you before! Who are you? Do you have some inner quarrel with my soul?"

The wise man kept forcing him to eat, and then he ran him. For hours he whipped the poor man and made him run. Finally, at nightfall, full of apples, fatigued, bleeding, he fell..............and vomited everything.............the good and the bad, the apples and the snake.

When he saw that ugly snake come out of himself, he fell onto his knees before his assailant.
"Are you Gabriel? Are you God? I bless the moment you first noticed me. I was dead and I didn't know it. You've given me a new life. Everything I've said to you was stupid! I didn't know."

The Holy Man replied,
"If I had explained what I was doing, you might have panicked and died of fear.
Muhammad said,
'If I described the enemy that lives inside men, even the most courageous would be paralysed.
No one would go out, or do any work. No one would pray or fast, and all power to change would fade from human beings,'

So I kept quiet while I was beating you, that like David I might shape iron, so that, impossibly, I might put feathers back into a bird's wing. God's silence is necessary, because of humankind's faintheartedness.
If I had told you about the snake,you wouldn't have been able to eat, and if you hadn't eaten, you wouldn't have vomited.
I saw your condition and drove my donkey hard into the middle of it, saying always under my breath, 'Lord, make it easy on him.'
I wasn't permitted to tell you, and I wasn't permitted to stop beating you!"




The healed man, still kneeling, said
"I have no way to thank you for the quickness of your wisdom and the strength of your guidance.
God will thank you."

Answer 2

definitely not there...but I have learned to never hold grudges.