Skip to main content

Why You Should Stop Searching For Your Purpose

In the last few months, I'd been struggling with feelings of unfulfillment, direction and purpose. Although I have three jobs, a business and a good relationship with God (at the moment LOL), I felt like something was missing and I was just wasting away - every day. 

 Was I just waking up, working, cooking, cleaning, sleeping and doing it all over again the next day? Was there something I should have been doing that I wasn't? Was the more God wanted of me? Was I just coasting through life?

 As usual, I took it to God and I trusted He would show/tell me exactly what I needed to know in this season of my life, and I'm so glad He did.

 On my (motivational) radio programme, the Holy Spirit prompted me to talk about finding your calling and purpose in life, and in doing research for the show, I stumbled upon a few powerful thoughts that really challenged the way I thought about God-given purpose. Is it really what we think it is? Have we complicated this matter of 'finding your calling'?

 I couldn't keep to myself, and I hope these help you as much as they have helped me:
Os Guinness on “Making an Idol of Work”
“Do we enjoy our work, love our work, virtually worship our work so that our devotion to Jesus is off-center? Do we put our emphasis on service, usefulness, or being productive in working for God—at his expense? Do we strive to prove our own significance? To make a difference in the world? To carve our names in marble on the monuments of time? The call of God blocks the path of all such deeply human tendencies. We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone. We are not called to special work but to God. The key to answering the call is to be devoted to no one and to nothing above God himself.”
Martin Luther King Jnr.:
“The maid who sweeps here kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays – not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”
Oswald Chambers on “Being Too Busy for God”
“Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him. . . . The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him. … The men and women our Lord sends out on His enterprises are the ordinary human stuff, plus dominating devotion to Himself wrought by the Holy Spirit. Be absolutely His.”

Martin Luther King Jr on “Being Called to Excel in Your Calling”
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Frederick Buechner on “How to Discern Your Calling”

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”

God has called you to be in a relationship with Him first... before anything. It's in that place of friendship and intimacy that He slowly reveals the blueprint, one step at a time. Don't put undue pressure on yourself to find your 'great calling' and don't allow yourself to obsess over it. If you allow God in and draw close to Him every day, He will work in and through you to fulfil His purpose for your life. And believe me, He has plans for you and you matter (a lot) in His great master plan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Talk About Time: Where is Yours Going?

I've come to a stage in my life where one of the top 3 things I am most passionate about is how I'm spending my time. Why? It's one of the greatest gift God has given us - and a lot of the time, truth be told, we squander it. How you spend your time is a reflection of what you really care about. When you find that hours on hours are lost on online shopping, scrolling through Instagram, watching your favourite series, complaining about everything that's wrong in your life, it shows that's where you're truly most invested. It's where your heart and your mind are. Aside from chasing our passions and 'living our best life', how often do we remember that we are called to much more? That our lives are not just for chasing pleasures and being comfy? That we were created neither to just pay the bills or make loads of money? What are you doing with your time? It's a question I now ask myself everyday. It's so important to me not to go thro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why We All Need To Stop Feeling Bad About Our Bad Habits

Growing as a Christian and getting rid of bad habits is hard. Growing up, I always struggled with a bad temper and angry outbursts. I was simultaneously a great lover (of people) and a great fighter (my secondary school friends can testify so well to this!). But around 19 years old, with determination in my heart and God’s ever-present help, I was able to contain my emotions relatively well and hardly lost my temper any longer.  All that time, I didn’t realise how much God had worked on my heart, until about a year ago, when I tweeted about my anger issues as a teen and a former colleague replied, “Really? I can’t even imagine you being angry, Kunmi.” I literally LOL-ed. Girrrl, if only you knew! But recently, I’ve had to face my demons again. There’s something about being in such an emotionally-invested situation like marriage that can sometimes bring out things that have long been buried in you, or things you never even knew were there. When I got married, I found that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are You About to Lose the Gifts God Has Given You?

My brother and I, who interestingly have a 10-year age gap, are constantly teasing, play-hitting or sharing a joke and a laugh (or ten), but on the odd day, we have important conversations about important things. One such rare day was yesterday when we went from gossiping (oops) about specific family members, to talking about gifts.   He opened up to me about how he used to dream a lot when he was younger, where God revealed lots of things to him. But when – as a lot of us tend to do – he failed to take the time to sit with God and work on interpreting those dreams, they soon stopped. However, he found that when he takes some time out to fast and pray now, the revelations through dreams come back.   Then, he said something which really caught my attention. It wasn’t something I hadn’t heard before but it, all of a sudden, sounded fresh in my ears and almost undoubtedly seemed like it was a message targeted at me. He said, “That’s the thing about your God-given gifts. ...
1 comment
Read more