Submitted by Lara
Cook
For I
know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for
evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11
What if the life
you’re living right now is the life you are supposed to live, the life God
planned for you. What if you there is no more?
Would you be happy about that? It
seems we spend so much of our lives trying to escape the life we have, as if
that will give us the life we want, only to find out that what we thought we
wanted was not actually what we want at all.
Sometimes it is because we are searching for our “purpose”, like we shop
for the latest fashion trend. In the
process we can miss out on God’s purpose altogether. “Finding your purpose” can be painted as a midlife
scavenger hunt that we partake of when we don’t know why we are where we are or
what to do next. We don’t make the plan,
God does. We can ask Him to reveal our
purpose to us, but we don’t draft our own purposes if we truly want to follow His
plan. We are desperate for something but
we don’t know what. We need change and
we need meaning so we grasp and we pick something that sounds impressive.
Sometimes the purpose God has
for us is not glamorous. In fact, most often it is not. That really hard, messy situation you are up
to your elbows in is probably where you are supposed to be, and it’s not easy
to break free and run. God uses His
people for the most difficult jobs because He has prepared us for this
assignment in some way. This purpose is
usually two-fold. He is using you in some way for His plan, but He is also
preparing you for the next step in His plan for you. Sometimes instead of
feeling honored that He put us in this position, we feel baffled and confused
and wonder what God is doing. We may be
doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing right now, but we don’t want to identify
it as our “purpose”. Fulfilling purposes
are not always beautiful and neat times in our lives, but that doesn’t mean it
will be that way forever. We have many
different purposes in our lifetime. If
you are in a difficult season with a challenging purpose, take heart in knowing
that another season is coming and with it new purpose.
It has been said, “Find your
purpose and you will find your life”. Truly,
if you find your purpose, you will lose your life, because purpose involves
letting go of how we think it should go.
Complete surrender to God’s plan is required to fulfill your purpose,
and that means laying aside your desires in full pursuit of His. Then
you will find your life.
When God moves us out of our comfort zone —
into places that are way bigger than us, places that are difficult, hard,
painful, places that even hurt —this is a gift. We are being
given a gift. These hard places give us the gift of intimately knowing God in
ways that would never be possible in our comfort zones. –
Anne Voskamp
Anne Voskamp
