I Stopped Trying to Find my Purpose

Discovering freedom in not having all the answers

In the quiet hours after my son’s bedtime my husband and I sat cuddled up in our living room talking about the dreams we had for our lives. I confessed I had been feeling a lot like a boat without any wind in my sails—like I was just sitting on the water going no where.

The “purpose” I searched for in my early twenties felt like a thing of the past. Maybe it was partly a trauma response after a near miss during my son’s birth or maybe it was the psychology behind my roles changing or maybe a combination of both with some other pieces I wasn’t yet aware of.

I missed the feeling of having a clear goal. As much as I’m an artist at heart, I longed for the feeling of tracking my creative dreams with a list of tasks to complete with a sense of accomplishment and celebration when the work was finished.

As a visionary, I love the importance of vision and knowing what direction we’re heading in. The little daily decisions we make add up to make the big changes in our lives.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Provers 29:18

This fear that I was without vision started to consume me. I wanted the vision to be clear like a little light up pathway with arrows pointing and shouting saying, “this is the way!”

But it felt much more fuzzy than that. My mind felt like it was constantly spinning and overwhelmed by my current season. Many of my days felt like I was just surviving. Thinking about a vision for the future felt equally overwhelming. I felt behind, too late, and like I’d missed it already.

A part of me longed to honor my present season. I knew it was hard. I also knew it wouldn’t last forever. Honor asked me to do what it required of me right now and give myself grace for it to feel unfamiliar, awkward at times, and even painfully slow.

At a gathering someone asked me about my purpose. Had I found it yet? The question caught me off guard. It didn’t feel appropriate to share my goal of not peeing when I sneeze (thanks to PT I knocked that one out of the park) so I just fumbled some vague answer that basically meant, I actually don’t know right now.

In the book “The Heart is a Noisy Room” Ronald Boyd-MacMillan critiqued Western Christian’s obsession with purpose and I realized I had fallen prey to that same belief. After sharing heart-wrenching sorties of the persecuted church with many members losing their lives early for the sake of the gospel he wrote,

“The meaning of life does not consist in what we make of it, but in what God makes of it…Instead of obsessing about what our life’s purpose is—as so many do today in the Western Church, while seeking to control the future—I have to take a lesson from the persecuted church that it is OK to die quite unaware of our life’s meaning.”

I felt lost when I looked for a specific purpose like it was a right or wrong answer on a test.

But the pressure of making meaning of our lives wasn’t meant to rest solely on me and it isn’t meant to rest solely on you.

As a creative, I continually question the value of my work. I feel this deep pull that I am specifically meant to create this specific thing that the world needs. Until a day comes when that just feels like way too much pressure.

I wish I could check off a to-do list for my life dictated by God and know that I have done it right. That I am right on track. But I think that would take some of the joy out of it.

I like the creative process of experimenting, failing, brushing myself off and having the audacity to try again. And truthfully, I’d miss it.

There is humility and freedom in realizing that God can always find someone else out there to make the thing wether we decide to or not. Some of the joy in creativity for me is determining that I want that wind in my sails.

Honor allows creative work to sometimes feel purposeless. For creative people to sometimes feel directionless. For meaning and vision to not always be immediately clear or to make sense in the way we want it to. Because we wouldn’t really need God if it always did.

Last little harvest from my flower garden.

Releasing this to God allows me to trust that meaning and purpose is here—even if I don’t always see it. I hear echoes of God’s question in Isaiah 43:19, “do you not perceive it?” And my prayer becomes, Lord, help me perceive it.

Maybe I don’t need to go out and find my purpose. Maybe my purpose has already found me.

“Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can't bear grapes by itself but only be being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with me.”

John 15:4