Our core identity is as children of God, in an intimate relationship with our Creator and bearing His image and likeness. When we reject, or choose to ignore, our identity, chaos steps in to fill the void. How much more lost can you be in the world than not even knowing who you are?

Our identity is also a paradox. The things that we naturally desire, for the most part, are the things that are injurious to us. I used to believe that animals were rational beings in that can only act in their self-interest. My theory went out the window when our family dog ate a towel.

The Baltimore Catechism beautifully articulates the purpose of our lives: to know, love and serve God in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. The first two parts of that proposition are easy to accept. The natural law confers a right to a child to know their parents, if God is our father, we ought to have knowledge of and be in relationship with Him. We do not exist in a vacuum; our identity exists within the context of the human family. We are relational beings, solitude is one of the gravest threats to our emotional and mental wellbeing.

Next, we are to love God. This, too, is easy to accept when considered in broader terms. The Creator of the universe, source of truth, king of kings, love itself offers us His love and invites us to accept the gift. The proposal is not derived from our merits or because of anything we’ve done, but because of who we are. Accepting and returning that love, as a child does for their parent, is also good and holy.

The third purpose, however, can be a stumbling block. As we know from Angelology, service was the purpose that made St. Michael the most powerful warrior and cast untold numbers of angels into Hell. This is no small principle.

The word, serve, carries with it a negative, but undeserved, negative connotation. It’s the right word to express this role, but a wrongful interpretation could equate it with enslavement. We are bound to God by the nature of our existence, but God’s nature does not allow Him to impose His love upon us. How can true love come only on the point of the sword? To serve God is not to have our free will stolen from us, but rather our willing donation of it to His greater purpose. Our lives and our actions are intended to be an extension of His saving work. Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep. This meant to bring the Gospel to a world starving to know who they were, but it also meant for me to make my kids breakfast. The corporal works of mercy are daily expressed within the family, even in the little things.

Service is a noble purpose that pulls us out of our orbit and obsession with the things that draw us inward and turns us into an extension of Love. There’s a reason people always feel better after some act of volunteerism, why we oddly feel better after an hour of picking up trash on the side of the road than we do after an hour of watching TV. We give of ourselves for the sake of others. When we serve, we become part of something greater.

The paradox of surrender, of service, is that we give up that which hurts us in exchange for that which heals. It is easy to know and to love God, the right and natural next step is to serve Him by serving those around us.