General Purpose of Life

Introduction
Obviously this is a big one, which will change as my life goes on.  I'm pretty young to be attempting to answer such a question, but in reality I don't truly mean to answer it.  All I desire to do right now is to codify my early thoughts in the matter.  I'm young, recently married, recently into my first house, 5 or so years into my career.  A good time to be considering the overall purpose and direction of life in general, and specifically my life.  My life specifics will have to wait for another day.  But to life in general, well I'd like to take a stab.

Stance Summary

"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"
And he said to him, "'You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'  This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'  On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."¹

Christ, when asked what the greatest commandment is (thus the one thing we should all do), gave the statement above.  I see in his response something defining our general purpose of life which is foundational to our very nature.  If the two great commandments are to love God and love people, then the general purpose of life is relational.  And not just relational, but positive, loving, affirmative relationships. Relationships with God, Spouse, Kids, Family, Friends.  That is our general purpose.


Personal Actions Based on Stance
So to make that a little more specific to me, what relationships are or should be, most important to me?  God.  Wife.  Family.  Friends.  In that order.  Basically, all I do should be in some way assisting, or benefiting the relationships here.  Especially the two biggest relationships in my life, my Wife and my Savior.  That's a good reminder to me to make sure when I'm at home that I'm not wasting time, or being separated from my wife by stupid arguments or not helping when I could help.  That means making a specific effort to love my wife in words (by saying truthful and uplifting things to her), in actions (by serving her to the best of my ability), and in my thoughts (by not focusing on the hardships, but rather the blessing she is to me).


Expansion
Reading my Stance on the Primary Foundational Principle² goes through these verses in more detail and is foundational to some of the logic that is used to derive a General Purpose of Life from these short verses. 

What is a purpose?  It can be defined as a function, or an objective.³ So what is the objective, or functions of our lives?  There can be a purpose of a specific life chosen by an individual (either that individual or his master) but as stated above that is a different stance.  Instead, what is the objective or function of all of us? Kind of a crude way to put it, but the only entity able to define the purpose of the human race in general is the one who created them.  If there is no creator, well then there can't be a purpose to the overall human race, just individual, potentially conflicting purposes.  As a Christian I believe that God created us, and thus God can and has given us purpose.
 
One of the movies that touches on this in a way that I appreciate is Into the Wild (2007)⁴ where the protagonist, independent and lonely reads this passage from Dr. Zhivago

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness,

Upon reading that, the protaganist scribbles in the margins

Happiness is only real when shared

Despite all his desires to get away from it all, to be completely and utterly independent, he came to understand that without others, without relationships, one can not be happy.  The purpose of life is gone.  Our protagonist in this move was not a Christian which removes that relational possibility as well. 

Sources

1.  Matthew 22:36-40 - link
2. Primary Foundational Principle - link
3. Purpose Definitions - link
4. Into the Wild - link 

Closing
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