Chapter 4 - Purpose through Five Covenants

And how to arm yourself against Chaos and Evil

Be warned, this is a long chapter but I think it captures the essence of the topic.

Purpose is the driving factor behind all we do in life and yet it is difficult to define. It is like a figure in the mist in the early morning. You think you may have it in focus but when asked to truly try defining it, it vanishes. I actually believe that Purpose evolves as you evolve in your pursuit of Vocation Mastery. You may not have a Purpose in the current survival mode of day to day work. You may be early in your Vocational development and may not even like what you are doing. Remember we call this stage of life work, but rest assured it will develop into something bigger. Regardless of what stage you are in, it is clear to me that without Purpose to anchor and fuel you, the path forward will be unfulfilling and empty.

When I was a around 11 years old, Chuck Norris came out with a movie called “The Octagon”. I so wanted to see it as I was so into martial arts thanks to overviewing number of Kung Fu shows on Saturday morning. Chuck Norris was the hero we all wanted to be. I mean who would not want to be Chuck Norris even today. I kept pestering my father to take me. Remember this was the before Beta, VHS, DVD’s, and the Internet with all the movie access you have today. If you wanted to see the movie then you had to go to the movies to see it. Now we never went to the movies. It was an expense we couldn’t afford much like eating out or take home pizza, but I finally wore my father out and we went. It was the first grown up movie I recall going too and it was rate R. The opening scene, is a baby Chuck Norris, who is found by a Japanese family and the father of the family does not want the young man, so he takes the baby and throws him into the water to see if he can swim or survive. The metaphor was if the young Norris swam he was allowed to live and become part of the family and if he drowned then it was fate playing out. Now you all know Chuck Norris is not going to drown and that establishes the basis for the rest of the moving.

For some reason this always stayed with me. You may say the father was crazy to see if the baby would survive, but as I learned from my father you have to sometimes put your kids in a position to sink or swim, otherwise they will never figure out how to survive without you. Remember the world is a harsh place to live and certainly is not easy, so surviving in life is an important skill. Maybe you have been thrown into the same situation by chance or on purpose by your parents or maybe you as a parent have had to do the same with your kids. Either way, it is certainly not the easiest part of the transition of raising kids to become an adult.

Early on in my youth, I found myself simply trying to survive. My dad was certainly not the gentlest of parents when it came to teaching us how to transition from kids to adults. I can remember a period of time when I came back from college for winter break. My parents refused to come pick me up from Lehigh University as it was over 3 plus hours away from the house on Long Island and you had to drive thru or around New York City. Remember my dad was a professional truck driver for Shell Oil and he really hated driving as he did it 60 plus hours in a tanker truck around New York City. So how I used to get home was to walk down to the Greyhound bus station in Bethlehem, take the bus to the transit hub at 42nd Street in NYC, walk down to Madison Square Garden at 35th Street, take the Long Island Railroad out from there to Greenlawn and then walk home. It would take around 6-8 plus hours to make the trip and lets just say that Bethlehem, PA and Mid-Town New York City in the early 90’s was anything but safe and pleasant. I would even say it was flat our rough.

I arrived at the house early in the morning around 4am after running the gauntlet of the trip and walk in through the side door to the house. There at the kitchen table was my father, eating his breakfast of oatmeal and coffee in his grey Shell Oil company uniform. He greets me and after the formalities he informs me he had gotten me a job for the winter break. Now my dad had a firm belief that you always had to work no matter what the job, so his concept of a winter job was as follows. In New York you are not allowed to pump your own gas and so there are people that are hired to provide this service and they are called a “pump jockeys”. Well the pump jockey, Oscar, at the Broadway Shell had been mugged and stabbed so I was going to be his replacement for the next few weeks while his stomach wound healed up. My dad said that the job started at 5AM so I had to start walking to get there for opening.

I had just gotten thrown into the pool of water. This was my fathers many introductions to how to be an adult in life and to work. I never got a chance to ask him why he thought that this was a great idea to work at a location where the previous employee had been stabbed, but I worked that job for the winter break regardless. The two mechanics were certainly interesting. Dennis was an alcoholic with a messed up family environment and Russel was a cocaine addict with an equally colorful life. It was a cold winter. I survived it, learned street smarts and also avoided getting mugged and stabbed. I learned to swim fast.

A weird event occurred one day while I was working there. Located behind the gas station was a company that installed new and replacement underground gasoline and diesel tanks. Towards the end of one day, I am pumping gas for a customer and through the fence from their yard walks a worker from hard day of working the cold and wet conditions of a New York winter. I look up and there is a kid that I knew from my High School. It was Luke a friend I knew from High School. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. Luke was the Valedictorian from our high school. He is wearing overalls, covered in mud and oil and is walking home in the slush.

I was happy to see Luke but was perplexed. We started with the usual small talk then I asked Luke what he is doing working as a laborer at a tank company. In fact, I had expected Luke by now to be building a rocket or solving some important world problem. Luke goes on to explain to me that he was at college, lost interest studying advanced physics and dropped out. He was now working at the tank company and planned on going back to college to study philosophy. I am shocked as Luke was so smart and good at math, so much so he was taking college classes in math and physics while we were in high school.

Luke went on to explain that he felt that man did not have a clear purpose in life and he wanted to write a book on it similar to the great Greek philosophers. We talked a little more, I shook his hand and wished him luck and watched him as he walked through the dirty slush on his way home. I do not recall seeing him again, but it got me thinking about what is our Purpose. Maybe I need to do some research and see if Luke ever wrote that book. Now after thirty plus years, I am revisiting the concept to help clarify the Purpose needed for Vocational Mastery myself. I just hope I can measure up to what Luke was looking for.

The year after of meeting Luke, I was a Junior at Lehigh University and my college career was floundering. I had fallen into a slump. I hated college and really had not figured things out. To be honest, I was failing out of school and the military was threatening to pull my ROTC scholarship. I had not figured out this Purpose thing yet let alone Vocation or Mastery. Lehigh’s campus is also located on the North side of South Mountain and from October to March the campus is in an enteral shadow and when this is coupled with the wet and damp Lehigh Valley winters, things get flat out depressing. When all of this was combined with the grueling Lehigh Civil Engineering program and me failing, it certainly got to me. I contemplating dropping out, taking my lumps as an enlisted soldier or even worse suicide.

I soon found myself in the ROTC program offices talking to Lieutenant Colonel Cunningham, who I gravitated towards as a mentor and life coach. I can still see him sitting at his desk as he listened to me whining about being lost and worried about failing out of school. He calmly leaned away from his work, thought for a second and said, “Your problem Thumm, is you have no Goals”. Well I had no idea what he was talking about. My entire life I had just winged it and never had a plan. I was certainly smart enough to get through life but now things were getting way more challenging. He recognized that I had no structure and therefore my energies were lost. He reached back and grabbed a book off the shelf, hands it to me and said “Read this and come back in a week”.

I have to be honest. I did not read it right away. I failed another test and was ready to quit when I looked at that book and gave it a shot. The book was about how to establish goals and set yourself up for success. You can read some books like that now and the process is still the same. Reflect on your life, decide what you want your roles and outcomes to to be, establish shot term and long term goals to support these roles and outcomes, write them down and then knock them off. Post the goals everywhere you can, even your bathroom mirror and recite them daily. Rinse and Repeat. The success of accomplishing the goals starts to build, the cycle repeats and you will start to move the needle with regards to outcomes, confidence and a ultimately towards Purpose.

Well I really did not have a choice. I could not afford to pay back what I owed the military nor was I interested in joining the Army as Private to pay back the loans, so I grabbed a pen and paper and started to follow the process. I do want to clarify that I have no problem being an enlisted soldier it was just that I had invested to much time and energy to see that go to waste by quitting. My initial long term goal was simply to graduate and so all of my goals where around that. A year and a half later, I graduated from Lehigh and got my commission into the Pennsylvania National Guard as a new butter bar Lieutenant. The first major lesson was learned with regards to Purpose and that is, “If you do not have Goals, you do not have a map to achieve your Purpose". Goals define and provide Purpose.