1.4 You are a mission.

An imaginative story of a teenager

“One day I was looking in the mirror and I saw a face with light skin, thick eyebrows, a few freckles and flawless skin. As I stared at myself, I felt a strange sense of detachment - almost as if I were watching the scene from above. I saw a face - and suddenly realized that face was part of “me”. For a moment I felt like I was looking into a stranger’s eyes, even though I knew it was my own reflection. Who is “me”? What is a person? WHAT.. I was kind of blown away by my own deeply existential questions.

Were those people right who said we were just a product of coincidence? Basically nothing more than the random combination of cells?

No…  that couldn’t be true. Every day I noticed  the movements inside of me looking for a deeper meaning in life and a higher calling. I did not see a great sense in going to school, working and having a busy family life, and then dying - only to leave kids with the same aching heart.” 

“Why do I exist?”

The Search For Meaning 

Imprinted in the human heart is the question: 

Why do I even exist? What is my purpose? 

That question is tough. It’s not one you can simply ask someone else and get a ready-made answer. 

Or can you? 

Imagine asking your mom: “Hey Mom, why do I exist?”

She could answer by saying straightforward, because I love your dad (hopefully) and that led to making a baby. That’s true on the simplest level of this existential question. We are because of our parents.

But then..  why do they exist? And what is their purpose? Or is our existence ultimately meaningless?

Created for God 

Many people nowadays search for the meaning of their life but don’t find it. If you are not finding something, maybe you’re looking in the wrong place.

 The Church says something profound here. The Catechism teaches:

“...man is created by God and for God” (CCC 26), and

“ In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life” (CCC 1).  

In other words: without understanding the mystery of God we cannot fully understand ourselves.

We need to understand the mystery of God - as far as we can.

Our purpose is love

Very simply: God is love. So our purpose is to discover that we are loved - and to respond to that love. 

We respond by loving God, by loving ourselves rightly, and by loving our neighbor.

I invite you to notice the ways God loves you. He loves you in every moment (though we are often unaware of it). Sometimes, His love appears in small joys - yes, it can be that cup of coffee. Other times it is felt in deeper ways: in relationships, those moments of peace when you look at the sun going down or a joyful laughter. He loves you also when you mess up because His love is unconditional.

God’s love hidden in the sunset.

Vocation is the Call to Love

When you truly discover how deeply loved you are, something shifts - you begin to find your own way of giving love. This can happen in every small action. As some saints said: “Do small things with great love.”

Pope Francis beautifully described in “Evangelii Gaudium” that we ARE a mission. We often think we have a mission and need to figure it out, but the truth is deeper:  we actually are living missions. 

What does that look like?

It means “bringing light, blessing, enlivening, raising up, healing and freeing” ("Evangelii Gaudium": Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today's World (24 November 2013), 2013) to the people. If you only make one person’s life better you are truly living your mission. 

This is the call to love: to enrich others lives, to want the best for them and to give ourselves as a gift. As we are images of God we can live that out in showing others their belovedness. It is embracing that reflection of God’s love that we are.

The way this mission unfolds is always unique and personal, and it is discovered step by step in the concrete reality of your life.

The mission to love looks different for everyone.

What Psychology Says About Purpose

Psychology alone cannot answer the “why” of human existence.

But it can describe that we search for meaning and that it can be found.

Viktor Frankl, who devoted his work to this topic, taught that meaning can be found in every situation, even in suffering. Meaning, he said, is trans-subjective—bigger than our limited perspective. Each situation contains an inherent meaning that is both objective and deeply personal, depending on the person and the context.

His insights are powerful. I’ll explore them more deeply in another article.

Faith + Psychology Together

Where our GOODNESS comes from Psychology cannot answer. 

This is why I love bringing faith and psychology together.

Psychology helps us understand and navigate our inner world, like the search for meaning and identity even though most schools of psychology don’t have to offer a lot in that regard.

Faith reveals the source and purpose of that inner world—God’s love.

Together, they form a powerful lens: faith gives us the why, psychology helps us explore the how.

Your purpose isn’t something you invent. It’s something you discover—in love.