Finding Purpose

I’ve been struggling lately with the idea of purpose. The good Lord allows me to be here for some reason. If I wasn’t part of a plan of His, He would have taken me home already. Obviously in this season of my life I am a wife, a homemaker, and the homeschooling mom to three little people.

I’m thankful for it and content in that position, raising them up to know and love and live for the Lord is what I’m supposed to be doing right now. But they’re getting a little older, a little more responsible, a little easier to move around with, and I think there needs to be more. There’s been a nagging feeling, a conviction in my heart that our family needs to be more service minded, more others focused, more bold in our faith and the proclamation of the Good News of Christ!

Call it getting married and having kids young.

Call it being caught completely unprepared to live a God-honoring life.

Call it bad choices and material desires or just plain immaturity.

Whatever you call it, in the early years of being a wife and becoming a mother, finding out who I was in Christ – or even discovering that I HAD an identity in Christ – didn’t register a blip on my “things-to-do-with-you-time” radar.

Starting out it felt as if all we could handle, all we were meant to do was keep our heads above water, keep our kids alive, and somehow stay married in the process. Going to church, believing in God and not doing the “big” sins seemed like enough. I can tell you from the personal experience of those first years of our lives that I can completely understand why a great many marriages fracture early on. We cared far too much about what we could buy, the payments our monthly income could support, finding the jobs that allowed us to make more of the payments, and finding the daycares that wouldn’t wipe out those earnings so the payments for the stuff could be made. We clung to the “stuff” that we each did to “support the family”, using them as weapons to be hurled when stress overcame rather than offering them as living sacrifices. We each harbored these deeply held resentments towards one another at the kind of life we had, and the paralyzing hole we seemed to find ourselves within. It really was not an easy start to our lives together.

Eleven years, a lot of trials, the loss of everything the world finds valuable, and the never-ending grace of a very patient God have grown us up some. Our marriage relationship is strengthened considerably and our family never again wants to live for the empty, material things of this world. I want to steward His money the way He wants me to. I want to use my time, my skills, my schedule, and the unique gifts that come with being a homeschooling family for the glorification of God.

Nate and I don’t know what purpose is going to start to look like in our family but we both earnestly and prayerfully approach this season of our lives with the faith and hope that our steps will be directed by the Lord!

I’m not sure where we’re going, but I’m so excited for the journey!

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