My knowledge of movies and pop culture is laughable due to a
bad habit of burying myself in music that is three hundred years old. My students occasionally try to pull me back into the twenty-first century,
like this week when they told me about the soon-to-be-released movie, A Dog’s Purpose.
I asked one student, “What is the purpose of a dog?” and I
was pleased with her articulate answer, but then I followed up with, “What do
you think our purpose is?”
“That’s a tough question,” she replied.
How do I respond to that? Is there anything more important
than knowing our purpose in life? Vince Vitale put it well when he compared
life to an athletic competition: “Imagine being thrown into a game without
knowing when it started, when it will finish, what the objective of the game
is, or what the rules are.”
But how could I approach this topic without getting
religious? Am I here by accident with no purpose at all? Is there a God who
created me? If so, who is He, and why did He make me?
None of these questions fit the purpose of a violin lesson
so I steered the conversation back to music theory and intonation, but the
interchange stuck with me.
These topics might not be appropriate for casual
conversation with a violin student, but they are always appropriate within my
friendships. If I were thrown into a basketball game with no idea of the rules
or what to do with the ball, I would expect my friends to tell me those
important details. Shouldn’t we be just as open with each other when searching
for the right direction of our lives?
