Hi Friend!

Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a question that many of us ask ourselves every day…

“What is God’s Purpose for my life?”

This thought has crossed my mind many times. What is God’s purpose for my life? Maybe a better way to frame this question would be, “How can I live more purposefully for God?”

I’ve started wondering if waiting to figure out God’s purpose for my life may not be the way God actually wants me live. No. I think instead, He wants us to live with purpose every day.

So how do I live with purpose?

Whether you a are a follower of Christ or not, God still created you. Therefore, your life has a purpose. I sometimes remind myself of this when I feel like I’m not doing good enough. I don’t know about you, but I often feel “less than” when it comes to being the person I want to be for God. I look at my friends and I see all the things they’re great at. My closest friends are extremely hard workers, and I deeply respect that quality in them. In fact, that’s one reason why I think I befriended them in the first place…because I saw an outstanding quality in them that I wanted to emulate. Unfortunately, my personality is the type that wants to do anything but what I should be doing, and the term “hard-working” is not necessarily the first personality trait I’d put in my bio. [Outgoing, yes. Hard working…eh.] Luckily, I have commitments that force me to get up and work. If my body got to choose, it would lay in bed and watch “Murder She Wrote”, “Diagnosis Murder” “Sherlock Holmes”, or some other murder mystery show I used to watch with my mom when I was younger. But even though my body wants to lay in bed watching old mysteries, deep down I know my heart and mind want to do more.

I believe God created us to crave having a purpose, and consequently, he created us to need to work towards something. If we want to be used for God’s purpose, we also have to be willing to work for that purpose. But this is where I’m going to flip the script a little.

I’m not saying work harder. Be better. Etc. If I were, I would need to put a mirror in front of my computer screen and say, “Right back at you Helen.” No, neither one of us needs another person telling us to be better. We already know that deep down.

Instead, I want to encourage you to take baby steps every day towards living with purpose. Let me share with you what I tell myself when I start feeling like I’m not good enough and start going down the dark tunnel of questioning “my purpose”.

Have an intent for your day.

Yes, that simple. In order to start living with purpose, we have to start living each day with intention. Now don’t get crazy. It doesn’t mean you have to change 10 different things about yourself and achieve perfection by next Sunday. I’m the worst about that. While I’m at church I start thinking of all the ways I want to be better for Christ, and so I make a huge to-do list for the week that looks something like this:

1. Wake up at 5 am for an hour quiet time – [never happens]
2. Run at 6 am for an hour – [also never happens]
3. Eat healthy lunches – [typically ends by Wednesday]

Yep. Never happens.

You may have the same list written somewhere. A list that often ends by the next day because we’re trying to change everything in one sitting. I finally realized going about things this way wasn’t working. I was just getting down on myself because I could never live up to my list. And that’s because I was setting myself up for failure.

So instead of getting down on yourself this week, try this…Define one intention for your relationship with God for the week. And love yourself enough to be ok with slowly improving your relationship with God. What I’ve found is as my relationship with God improves, so do all the other areas of my life. By growing closer to God you’ll start seeing the changes within yourself that you’ve been wanting to see. You’ll start wanting to eat better, not for looks, but to take care of the body God blessed you with. You’ll start desiring to spend more time with Him in order to find your purpose within His words.

Start seeing your life as a project.

Maybe try to see life as a growing and learning process that won’t be perfected until we’re with the only perfect One in existence. Therefore, we can rest easy knowing that we’re never going to be perfect. So instead of living with the expectation that you, your marriage, your dating life, your kids, your career – or whatever – has to be perfect right now…Start living in the knowledge that we can let go of the overbearing expectations we hold for ourselves, and instead find peace in knowing God uses imperfect people for His purpose.

So while we may not know God’s exact purpose for our lives in the present moment, we can live with purpose by bettering ourselves every day for God.

So live purposefully and with intent. Accept taking baby steps. And eventually, you’ll look back and see how far God’s actually brought you. And you’ll be proud of the person you’ve become. I believe it’s important for us to remember so we never forget how far God’s brought us. So whether you’ve been going down your walk with Christ for a while, or you’ve just started your walk today, praise God for where you’re at! I suggest writing down your prayers, and all the amazing things you’re going to learn. Be so excited for the journey ahead! It’s truly a journey.

Praying for you as always.

Love in Christ,

Helen Elizabeth