WELL-BEING/BEING WELL

There is a part of us that focuses on our well-being, that desire that we be healthy, content, satisfied with our life and everything about it. Many ingredients go into our well-being, and many of them are out of our control. One of those ingredients is being well. Much of that is indeed in our control but some of it is not. Sickness and disease, accidents and tragedies know no bounds. We all fall victim in one way or another throughout our lives. And when we are not well, so, too, is our well-being not well.

There are two ingredients that are vital to our well-being and our being well. The first is a sense of purposefulness and the other is a sense of belonging. Both are necessary and both need each other. If they are not present, both of them, then our well-being will be less than it could or should be and we will not be well spiritually, physically and emotionally – all three.

We all know people who seem to be in perfect health but act as if there is something missing in their lives. This is especially true as we grow older, certainly after we retire. We used to be this, whatever that vocation is. We had a position, a job, a responsibility. When someone asked what we did, we could tell them and even tell them proudly. But now we are retired, our job has ended and we seem to have no purpose in life. I’ve known parishioners who died shortly after they retired because they felt and believed that their purpose in life was over.

They were wrong, of course. They did not realize that they now had a new vocation, a new job. They simply had to discover it. They had gifts and talents to share even if they had always taken them for granted. Now they had to take them as a gift to be given to those who needed them. No matter how old or how young we are, we all have a purpose in life. We simply need to discover it and we will be well and we will be content with our well-being.

Not only do we need to find a sense of purposefulness in our lives but we also need to have a sense of belonging. We all know people, and we may one of them, whose family is all gone – all have died or all have moved away or all no longer are a part of our lives. Yet we never have to be alone. We can choose to be but we do not have to be. When we belong to a faith community, to a church, we are never alone. We belong.

Both of these ingredients to a sense of well-being and being well are intertwined. We can find a purpose in life when we belong to a community and that community to which we belong helps us to find purpose in life. The community helps us discover the gifts and talents we have long forgotten or taken for granted and pushes us to put them into use in other ways than perhaps we did before.

A satisfied well-being does not come naturally. We have to work at just as we have to work at keeping ourselves well. And yet, even though none of us is ever in perfect health and all of us fall short of a perfect well-being, knowing our purpose in life and belonging to a community that supports us helps to make our life as well as it can be.