The other night, I was driving home from a late day at work, when something caught my ear on the radio. It was a live broadcast of John Kasich’s victory speech after winning the March 15th Ohio Republican primary. And what surprised me was that it sounded more like a motivational speech than a political one.
The part of the speech that stood out to me was about finding your purpose, a topic I’ve covered several times at Patheos in the past. But I don’t know that I’ve done a better job than Kasich did that night. I went to the Web and tracked down a transcript of the speech (thanks Vox). You can see the pertinent excerpt on purpose below. I have edited it ever so slightly, but have stayed true to the intent of his remarks.
You know, the lord has made everybody here special. I have been telling people this all across the country. Nobody has ever been made like you before, and no one will ever be like you again. You’re here a moment in time, and your job is to find the purpose that you have. Your job is to live life a little bit bigger than yourself. Your job is to be a center of healing, and justice, and hope in whatever way you can.
If you’re a schoolteacher, you give up money to change lives. If you’re a nurse, you work 15 extra minutes, when you’re dead on our feet, because you want to assure a family that things are going to be okay. And if you are a neighbor, that means that widow, who was married for 50 years who no one calls anymore…if you want to change the world, you take her to dinner on Saturday night. She’ll wear that dress she hasn’t worn in six months; I trust you to do it.
See, what I learned as a boy, what I learned from my mother and father, is that the spirit — it doesn’t rest in a big time politician and a big wig. You hired us to do the job, to create an environment of economic growth and opportunity. But that’s not where our spirit is. Our spirit is in us.
Believe that through your efforts…that you can change the world, that you can carve out a better future. That those special gifts that were given to each and every one of us in here. We are all part of a giant mosaic, a snapshot in time. Our job as Americans, our job as people who want to live good lives, is to dig deep down and understand that purpose and never underestimate that purpose and to change the world in which we live.
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