My Life Purpose--Gary Engstrom's Challenge

A Purpose In Life

I have always been a purpose driven person. Serious as a child, I took the lessons of good behavior to heart early. My parents said I never disobeyed them, and as I remember, never felt a need to disobey them or to act out, so to speak. Growing into a teen, my goals were molded by my Methodist upbringing, which has a large dose of social justice along with "perfection" doctrine. I determined I was going to be a nurse in a Methodist mission hospital somewhere in the world.

A longing for social justice, combined with the upheaval of the 60's civil rights and the 70's 'Nam" scene, indicated how I would spend my life and career, (now a special education teacher instead). I don't mean to trivialize my work, but I got on every bandwagon of social justice in town. And I didn't just join, I organized, started things going around my community, ran for boards, volunteered for jobs to be done. I wrote letters, marched, met with leaders, sang of my beliefs, and made my opinions known. But not being a confrontational person, I always tried to be thoughtful and work to be in dialogue with opposing views. I had a hard time with people who didn't want to talk about it.

I became a Quaker as I found their stated purpose was aligned with mine. What they believe is that there is that of God in every person, and it is our purpose to find it. I worked for the American Friends Service Committee as a volunteer for several years in many of their programs. They also were there molding my purpose in life and provided me with an organization to do it.

I became a music teacher. This turned a life-long passion into a major purpose in my life--to bring the joy of music and the performance arts to every child and adult I could. I taught elementary music to 700 children every year. I told all of them they could be "cowboys" when they sang, or "kings", or "lumberjacks" or "sailors" or "maidens" or whatever they threw themselves into in that song. And they did. Then as they got more sophisticated in their music, I tried to teach them that the radio or tape wasn't the only way to have music and arts in their lives. (My son just told me he talked to some young 20 year olds in that town who have a band, and mentioned their love of music came from their elementary music classes.) There were after school choirs, dance troupes, adult "by ear" classes, adult choirs performing major choral works (this in a town of 2500), summer theater workshops for children, and youth. I count this purpose of spreading the joy of music into people's lives as one of my most successful efforts. Many of my students have continued to include music in their lives, some as full time occupations, but most as one of their joys of life.

Six years ago, my youngest daughter gave birth to her second child. He was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 2 weeks. In his short life we struggled with such difficulty but little Caleb had a soul that gave us the strength and grace to live through his 5 months of life. There were many who commented that he had been an angel sent. When he died that November, it was an epiphany about the purpose of life for me. I saw that I had worked for important things in my life, but that there was a higher purpose to life. It was that each of us must touch each other with our souls, to interact soul to soul in such a way as to make that journey one that will finish as one with God. I personally believe I will have many lives before I will come to that final resting place as One with the Great Spirit of the Universe. Others may believe one time through is all we have. I won't know and neither will they. But whatever we believe about that, it is our soul that is important in our journey and we must make ways to touch as many as we can in this life. It is an ever expanding purpose for me that encompasses all that I have done before, but goes beyond that to a cosmic level. That is my purpose.