How to walk in God’s purpose when you don’t know what it is (S.2, Ep. 23)
Grab your latte & let's chat purpose. Listen In On Spotify | Pocket Casts | Anchor | Apple Podcasts season 2, Episode 23 How to walk in God’s purpose when you don’t know what it is We think of purpose oftentimes as this big, vague, mysterious idea of...
Living Purposefully Playlist
Music is SUCH a powerful tool.
It can uplift or help us really feel our sorrow. It can heal or bring up bitterness. It can empower or weaken.
Ever hear a song and immediately get struck by emotion?
Music is POWERFUL.
The Bible even speaks to the power of music.
So, we’ve compiled a She Lives Purposefully playlist to get you THROUGH. These are songs that me and our team listen to that move us for the better and draw us closer to the Lord. They instill and encourage healthy, intentional, healing, positive, real, purposeful ways of life.
God Uses What Holds Us Back
It’s as though the waves and waters of life were getting higher, without consuming me, and had risen just enough to make it hard to swim.
Just high enough so that I could do not thing but JUST stay above the water. I felt like I was using ALL of my effort to just stay above water rather than swim forward.
One life circumstance after experience after rejection after concern, one thing after another had been pulling me down and the waves were getting higher.
I was sick of that place.
I’d been wanting to desperately move forward in life happily, to grow, and I felt like so many things kept pulling me back.
But somehow, although giving full effort to do what felt like nothing but stay up, looking back, I realized I had been learning how to swim – or live – better.
I’d begun to realize that those things that were pulling me back were the very things God was using to grow me, mold me, teach me, change me, form me, stretch me, use me.
Embracing All God Has For You
God is a promise maker, not a promise breaker.
Promises are so easily broken. Even the most intentional, legally-binding, or emotionally-invested promises get broken.
This is why when I read a promise that God makes to me, I sometimes tend to not accept it fully. I find myself thinking that there has to be ifs, buts and loopholes.
But God is a promise maker, and a promise keeper.
What are some of His promises?
Comparison – The Purpose Distractor
Comparison creeps into the corners of our lives and then, slowly but surely, begins to consume us.
Really comparison is a form of jealousy. It’s the desire to be like or be better than someone or have what someone has, whether it’s a career, body, clothes, relationship, friends, etc.
“Envy makes the bones rot.” Proverbs 14:30
Comparison is dangerous and unrelenting.
It makes us feel less than and unfulfilled.
We all have different functions in this world, and comparison is form of thinking we should all have the same function, the same purpose, the same life. Comparison sinks in this thought that we should all be the same, all uniform and without differentiation.
But friends, you were uniquely created with a unique purpose.
Why We’re Not Forging Our Own Purpose
“Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” Psalm 127:1-2
If we want to step into all that God has for us, we have to do just that: STEP INTO all that HE has for us.
Friends, it is time to stop forging our own path. This little section of scripture holds SO MUCH regarding purpose.
Without God building anything and everything we do, even when we do it or reach for it with hard work, diligence and even anxious toil, it’s in vain.
Purpose in Pain
We often think of feeling pain as weak.
We tend to push it deep down, leaving undealt-with emotions and agony.
But over the years I’ve found that there is purpose in pain. God uses pain in countless ways, some of which we may never even see.
I grew up on a farm with a get-tough attitude. Though this helped me have thick skin, it often made pain difficult to deal with, so I pushed it deep down. I felt like a failure if I was hurt and felt any sort of emotional pain. Eventually I learned that there is a strange, beautiful purpose in pain.
Pain is something we all have in common: broken families, difficult relationships, death.
As humans, we have all felt that suffering to some extent or we will.
Though we may see and feel the hard times, we have a difficult time walking through those seasons and seeing purpose through it all.
When painful times come, we often ask the Lord to get us out of the trial, not grow and strengthen us as we walk through it.