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Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
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Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
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Hello, fellow seekers.
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Thank you for joining me today.
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Yesterday we asked what the body is for.
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We watched William Harvey look at the tiny valves in our veins, ask why they were there, and discovered that our blood goes around.
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We saw that we can't call anything broken or well until we know what it's for.
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And we saw that the body isn't a shell we carry around.
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It's how we live our purpose in this world.
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That leads to the next question.
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How can we know what we're for?
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Today we look at how purpose is found and three places you can start to look for yours.
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Let's start with a small organ that sits behind your breastbone, just above your heart.
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It's called the thymus gland.
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For centuries, no one knew what it was for.
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The scientists who studied it wrote that the thymus had long been, quote, an organ in search of a function, unquote.
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Immunologists believed it had become useless over the course of evolution.
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Some called it a graveyard for dying white blood cells.
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And because doctors believed it had no purpose, they treated it carelessly.
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Early in the 20th century, some babies were found to have a large thymus.
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Doctors thought the normal thymus was small, so a large one looked like a disease.
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When an infant died under anesthesia, the death was sometimes blamed on the big thymus instead of on the anesthetic.
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So some doctors prescribed radiation to shrink it.
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In Rochester, New York, researchers later followed 1,303 people who had been x-rayed as infants for an enlarged thymus.
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Over the decades, 50 of them developed thyroid cancer.
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Among 1,768 of their brothers and sisters who were never x-rayed, there were 13 cases.
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The irradiated group had the far higher rate, and the risk was still there more than 50 years later.
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Then in 1961, a young researcher in London named Jacques Miller tried something simple.
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He removed the thymus from newborn mice.
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The mice grew normally at first.
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Then, after weaning, many of them wasted away and died.
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Their blood had fewer of a certain kind of white blood cell.
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They couldn't even reject skin grafted from other animals.
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Miller published his findings in The Land Set that same year.
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The thymus wasn't useless at all.
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In early life, it is where the immune system's defenders are trained.
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Think about that.
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Millions of us are walking around today with a thymus that did its work quietly when we were young, whether anyone understood it or not.
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The purpose was there the whole time.
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It didn't change when we discovered it.
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We changed.
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And once we knew what the thymus was for, we stopped treating it like trash.
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That's why this question matters for your health.
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When we decide something has no purpose, we treat it carelessly.
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That's true of an organ and it's true of a whole person.
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If our bodies are just accidents and our lives are just random, then there's nothing to protect and nothing to aim at.
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Health becomes whatever keeps the parts running.
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But when we believe purpose is real and that it can be known, everything shifts.
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We start looking for it.
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We protect what serves it, and our healing has somewhere to go.
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My notes on the foundations of this work include a simple sentence, purpose can be known, at least partially.
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Here's why that matters to me as a practitioner.
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If purpose exists but can never be known, then no one can say whether a body is working well and no care could ever be aimed at anything.
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We'd be shooting arrows in the dark.
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And at least partially matters too.
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We don't need to know everything to take the next right step.
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A good map doesn't show every pebble.
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It shows enough to get you home.
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We've already laid the foundation for this earlier in this season.
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We saw that real science is what we can observe, test, and repeat.
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Then we spent a whole week on how we know.
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We looked at James Lind comparing sailors with scurvy.
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We looked at doctors followed for 50 years, and talked about fair tests where chance decides who gets what.
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Again and again we saw that careful observation, honest
Load full transcript
comparison, and a willingness to be corrected led us closer to the truth.
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Knowing what something is for works the same way.
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We look closely, we compare, we notice what happens when something is missing, and we stay open to being wrong.
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The same is true of purpose.
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The thymus had a purpose long before anyone believed it did.
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Our opinions didn't give it one, and our ignorance didn't take it away.
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Purpose is discovered, not invented.
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That doesn't mean our own meaning is a free-for-all.
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What we make of our lives is real and personal, but it's shaped by what's actually true about us.
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So how do we find it?
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I see three places to look.
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The first place is the body itself.
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Form tells us about function.
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Harvey looked at the valves and asked why they were there.
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Miller looked at an organ everyone had dismissed and asked, what would happen without it?
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Both of them learned what something was for by paying close attention to how it was made and what happened when it was missing.
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You can do the same with your own body.
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Ask, what does this part of me do when it's working well?
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And what happens when it can't?
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Your body is still telling the truth about its design.
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It has hands that grip and hold, a face with more than 40 muscles built to show what we feel to the people around us, a voice that can comfort a child in the dark.
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We were built to reach, to connect, to make, to move.
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Look at it from the other side too.
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What happens to a person who is cut off from all touch, from all meaningful work, from moving their body at all?
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We already know the answer.
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They wither.
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What a body suffers without tells us a great deal about what it was made for.
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This is part of how Chinese medicine or East Asian medicine works.
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We watch how a person's whole system is functioning, and the patterns tell us what the body is trying to do and what's getting in its way.
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The body's design isn't hidden.
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It's waiting to be noticed.
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The second place to look is our own lived experience.
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Some things make us come alive.
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Time disappears, our energy rises, we feel a deep satisfaction, even when the work is hard.
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Other things leave us drained and frustrated, and no matter how hard we push, these signals mean something.
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Joy and satisfaction often tell us we're moving in the direction we were made for.
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Frustration and a heavy, flat feeling often tell us we're pushing against the grain.
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Notice where you feel those signals.
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It's not only in your thoughts, it's in your body.
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The lift in your chest when you're doing what you love, the tightness in your shoulders when you're living someone else's plan for your life.
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The body often knows before the mind can put it into words.
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So how do we use this?
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Look back over your life and ask, when did I feel most like myself?
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Not happiest necessarily, most like myself.
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What was I doing?
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Who was I serving?
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What did I keep coming back to, even when no one asked me to?
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Those threads usually run through a whole life.
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They show up in childhood play and in the jobs we loved, in the things we do when we have a free afternoon.
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Other people can help too.
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Sometimes the people who love us see our gifts more clearly than we do.
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When several people keep telling you the same thing about yourself, it's worth listening.
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And the third place to look is revelation, what God has said about us.
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I want to tell you where I stand.
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I believe we were made by someone who knows exactly what we're for and who hasn't kept it a secret.
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The psalmist wrote, I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
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And the Apostle Paul wrote, For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
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Workmanship?
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Something crafted on purpose by a maker who had a plan.
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That means our purpose isn't something we have to build from nothing.
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It's something we get to discover and walk into.
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And notice that the verse says good works were prepared beforehand?
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That means the purpose came first.
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We don't invent it, we walk into it, the way we'd walk into a room that was prepared for us.
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How do we listen
for that?
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Through scripture, through prayer, through quiet, and through people God places in our lives.
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Often the answer doesn't come as a voice from the sky, it comes as a pull that won't go away, a door that opens, or a piece that settles in when we make the right choice.
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Whatever your faith, I invite you to sit with that possibility that you weren't an accident, that there's something you were made to do, and that it can be found.
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Now I want to be honest about this.
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None of us will figure this out all at once.
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Paul wrote about this too.
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For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.
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Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
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I find great comfort in that.
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We know in part, that's enough to begin.
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We don't need the whole map to take the next step, and every step shows us a little more.
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And purpose often unfolds in seasons.
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What we're for at 25 may look differently at 45 or at 70.
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A young parent's purpose may be poured into raising small children.
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Later, that same person may be called to teach, to build, to mentor, or to pray for the next generation.
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The core of who we are stays the same, but the way it's expressed grows and changes with us.
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That's freeing.
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It means we don't have to get it all right today, and it means it's never too late.
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A season of illness, loss, or change isn't the end of our purpose.
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Very often it's the doorway to the next part of it.
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The design of the body, the signals of our own experience, and what God has said all point in the same direction.
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When they line up, we can walk with confidence.
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When they don't, it's a good time to slow down, pay attention, and ask again.
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So here's one thing I'd like you to notice this week.
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Not a list, just one question.
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When do I feel most fully alive?
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Pay attention to what your body does in those moments, where you feel the lift, what you were doing and who you were with.
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Those moments are clues.
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They're your design speaking up.
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Today we asked how we can know what we're for.
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We met the thymus, an organ once called useless, treated carelessly because no one knew its purpose until one researcher found that it trains our immune system.
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We saw that purpose is discovered, not invented.
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And we looked at three places to find it.
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In the design of the body, the signals of our own lived experience, and what God has said.
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We know in part, and that's enough to take the next step.
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Tomorrow we ask what being well really looks like.
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If health only makes sense in light of what we're for, then well has to mean much more than nothing's wrong.
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I'll meet you there, with you every step of the way.
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Keep the conversation going.
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Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.