Purpose Driven Life Day 3

Day 3 of PDL is “What Drives Your Life?” I can’t say I came across any new information in this chapter, but it was still inspirational. It was a good reminder to focus on the most important things.

In this chapter, Rick Warren lays out the five most common things people are driven by: guilt, resentment and anger, fear, materialism, and need for approval. Under fear, he explored unrealistic expectations. I think in my life, I’ve found the most frustration from that; from being expected to be something I’m not, or to do something I can’t do. I recently decided to deal with an unrealistic expectation by understanding that it is somebody else’s opinion. After years of trying to meet it, I decided not to play the game anymore. I’m not saying I wrote the person off. Not at all. I just stopped trying to meet that expectation and stopped arguing about it. Then I looked for other ways to handle the situation that I can actually do.

The Purpose Driven Life Day 2

After 6 years of the book sitting on my shelf, I finally decided to tackle Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life”. As much as possible, I’ll try to share my thoughts, insights, and critiques here on my blog.

While Day 1 got off to a good start, Day 2 felt a little basic. Day 2 is “You are not an accident”. It’s a premise I’ve long since accepted. While building his case, Rick Warren goes into territory that could be mistaken for God micromanaging every aspect of our lives. That’s not a debate I want to go into, as I have no idea where the line goes between God controlling things and us making decisions to do good or evil. God can use any person or event for His purposes. I have no problem with that.

For this day, Rick Warren uses various Bible verses to talk about how God formed the earth to be inhabited. He also uses various paraphrases of Psalm 139. The chapter concludes with a poem by Russell Kelfer. The essense of the chapter is “God created you to be loved”. By Him.

I regret I’m getting few insights to share. The chapter ends with a Question to Consider “I know that God uniquely created me. What areas of my personality, background, and physical appearance am I struggling to accept?” I’m not sure I have enough bandwidth to expound on that one.

Hopefully I’ll have more tomorrow, on Day 3. I may not write a blog post for each individual day though.

If you'd like to go through this with me, you can get a copy through my affiliate link.




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The Purpose Driven Life Day 1

I became a Christian in 2002. That was the year Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life” came out. It was all over the place. BJ’s seemed to have several pallets of them. I tend to shun things that are popular, so I didn’t bother with the book.

Over the next several years, I heard a lot of things about it, good and bad. I’ve heard it accused of being occult based, of being apostate, of leading Christians astray and causing them to not focus on what matters. I’ve also heard of it helping people.

I used to belong to a Christian web forum. I gave up on Christian web forums. A text interface is a very hard way to discuss and debate matters, and it’s hard to tell if people are serious or trolling. People also tend not to read or evaluate what you write and go on the attack based on perception. That forum I was on spent a lot of time debating Rick Warren and The Purpose Driven Life. It got very heated. At one point, having read a lot of web sites and blog posts against it, I was against the book. Then I had an earth shattering revelation about critiquing something based on third hand information. I also read a few articles about Rick Warren, and some interviews with him. I realized that when he speaks, everything he says is right. He’s a very orthodox Christian in many ways. I think he’s ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention, or at least was initially. I’ve actually come to enjoy listening to him. He’s very gracious, highly committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and very much about getting out into the world and ministering to people. I know, he runs in some “interesting” circles and I was a little concerned when he joined the Council on Foreign Relations. But I decided I could not discuss or debate his book until I had actually read it for myself.