As someone who is very purpose-oriented in her life and a recovering people-pleaser, I am here to say that your purpose is not found in how you make others feel! Imagine that. I used to believe that my purpose was to make others happy. I recognized from a young age that I deeply feel joy, love, and gratitude, and I was excited to share that with others. I used to fall asleep telling myself that the day was a good day if I made at least three people smile. Yikes. As I said, the fruit of the Spirit I have experienced in my life is not something I am responsible for but something God shares with His children. I did not take responsibility for the joy I felt, but I did rely on that joy, as well as momentary happiness, to make me feel purposeful. If I was having a bad day and was having trouble extending kind words and actions to others, I felt like I let people down. In reality, I was seriously misunderstanding both purpose and the fruit of the Spirit. Recently, I have learned a lot about these things, and I want to share what I’ve learned so that you may find freedom if you struggle with purpose and expressing love, peace, and joy. I’ll start by talking more in-depth about three types of fruit as it is important to understand them before going on to talk about people-pleasing and purpose.
Galatians 5:22-23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (NIV)
- Love is the first type of fruit listed in these verses. Love is so beautiful, but it can also be complex and difficult. A huge aspect of love that I lost sight of was tough love: the ability to do what is best for a relationship even if that is going to cause some pain initially. Sometimes tough love comes in the form of disciplining a child for not looking both ways when crossing the street so that they may learn to make safer decisions. Maybe it is telling a friend that we recognize how they are being treated in their relationship and we are concerned for them. Or maybe tough love is talking to a loved one who is struggling with addiction and encouraging them to go to rehab. God calls us to love others, but sometimes love is not as bubbly and lighthearted as we would like for it to be. It is such a beautiful thing that God allows us to love others so deeply and to love them even when life is hard and our circumstances are less than ideal. Love does not always look the same as happiness.
- Another type of fruit that is worth mentioning here is peace. Sometimes I would avoid conflict because I wanted so badly to maintain peace and joy in my relationships, but (surprise, surprise) I learned that avoiding conflict can actually be very unhealthy for relationships. Recently I read somewhere, “God does not call us to be peacekeepers. He calls us to be peacemakers.” That hit me like a ton of bricks. To have peace does not mean that we should avoid conflict– it means that we should work through conflict with love, kindness, gentleness, etc.
- So let’s talk about joy and how I may have been seriously misunderstanding joy. There is a very big difference between joy and happiness, and I failed to consider the difference between the two. Meg Bucher writes in “The Beauty of Seeking Both Joy and Happiness in Christ,” “Happiness is a reaction to something great. Joy is the product of someone great.” She goes on to write, “Joy isn’t fleeting.” Can you tell where I’m going with this? I was confusing happiness and joy. I was letting the momentary feeling of happiness distract me from the long-lasting beauty of joy, and I was placing my identity in a fleeting emotion!! I’ll spare you from imagining how that could go by telling you it did not sustain me. Now I know that it can be so hard to feel joyful when we don’t feel happy. James 1:2-3 states, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of faith produces perseverance.” (NIV) These verses have helped me to reflect on the suffering I have experienced in my life, remembering that as my faith is being tested, it is also growing. While we won’t always be happy with our circumstances, we can choose to find joy in knowing that we serve a big God who works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28).
A couple of years ago, I heard Craig Groeschel say in a sermon “If you think something good, say it.” He went on to explain that we could be robbing someone of their joy if we do not tell them the good things we see in them. I took this very seriously. Our world needs as much joy as it can get, and I thought this was a great way to spread joy. I made a strong effort to speak as many of the good things that I thought as possible. While this taught me how to be more honest in pointing out the good qualities in others, I found that I strayed away from honest conversations that were not as fun and cheerful because I started placing my purpose and value into happy conversations. I lost sight of the difficult role that honesty plays in love, peace, and joy. To be able to speak out about the positive things we see in others with honesty and integrity is such a gift, but I would also argue that it is a gift to have challenging honest conversations as well. We need difficult conversations in love because that helps our relationships become even stronger and healthier. We need difficult conversations to help us make peace while experiencing conflict. We need difficult conversations to remember that happiness may be fleeting but joy is not.
This is where the people-pleasing in me really took some damage. Once I realized that some of the most loving things we can do in God’s eyes are very challenging and sometimes painful actions in our eyes, my heart shifted. I began to care less about making people happy all the time and more about following God’s design for healthy relationships because, really, “happy” is not always healthy. Since having this change in perspective, I have had way more honest conversations with the people in my life than ever before. Because of these conversations, I have new closeness and respect for those around me, and it also revealed to me that some people are just not meant to stay in our lives.
It can be so addicting to feel liked by others, and I hated feeling like someone disliked me or was upset with me. I have learned that what others think of us is not our business and that I am only responsible for the way I treat others, not how they respond to my actions. This revelation has led to some gradual fizzling out of unhealthy relationships with a few abrupt endings as well. While it is never fun to be disliked, it is something that naturally happens in life, and that’s okay. We can also still be respectful while being honest, and we can be respected without being liked. And that’s okay too. Sometimes it’s more important to be honest than likable. Sometimes our acts of love make other people angry at us before they make them understand. But at the end of the day, we live for an audience of One. How other people feel about us is not up to us and should not be our focus. Our focus should be to set our eyes on God and allow Him to let the fruit of the Spirit reveal itself through our lives.
Now finally, I want to say a few more things about purpose. At the time I began to understand more about purpose, I had already gained a better understanding of love, peace, and joy. I recognized people-pleasing behaviors within myself and started to focus on living for an audience of One. This is when I started to think more about what my “purpose” could be according to God. That’s where I think I had it all wrong. “My purpose” is not really mine but is God’s purpose through me. Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (NIV) HIS purpose, not mine. In order to truly see purpose in our lives, we have to let go of our understanding of what purpose may be, turn our eyes to God, and leave it to Him to use us for His purpose. I have learned that purpose does not have to be one thing, and it is not my job to provide purpose in my own life. If I follow God and allow Him to work through me, He will bring purpose into my life and into my actions.