Living a Purposeful Life - Pt 1

When I was growing up I didn’t know it was possible to live a purposeful life. I was around people who mostly lived from day to day. I can remember always wanting to go to church but we didn’t attend regularly due to circumstances that came into our lives. When I did attend I enjoyed the worship, prayers, and sermon and always left wanting to be a better person and feeling bigger on the inside. 

I didn’t know for years that faith was taking root in my heart. I attended the confirmation classes and after we learned select portions of scripture we were given a Bible.  I tried to read the Bible like you would an ordinary book from the beginning to the end. When I would get to the 3^rd book of the Bible which was Leviticus I would usually stop and set the Bible aside.

When I graduated from high school I moved to the city and got a job at a bank and went to school at night. That hunger for God was beginning to wane.  I considered myself a good moral person and thought there was probably a giant scale in heaven that would weigh my good deeds versus my bad deeds. I rationalize that if my good deeds outweighed my bad deeds then God would someday let me into heaven. So I began to climb the ladder of good works.

A year later I began to date a wonderful man but he was also not raised with any spiritual teaching so we were both lost but didn’t know it. We dated for two years and then married and immediately my husband was sent to Vietnam for one year. When he returned he went to school to begin a career with the airlines. 

I look back on those years and can only say that instead of pursuing God and spiritual things we began to pursue the American Dream of getting your dream job, owning your own home, and filling it with new furniture and decorations. We begin to be part of the “charge now and pay later generation” and had friends with the same goals. It was not a life about others but a life all about us.

What began to change our outlook on life was when we began trying to have children and I couldn’t conceive. It was a very emotional season of my life to be told time and time again I was not pregnant. During this time that small seed of faith inside me began to be awakened. One night when I was so discouraged I got down on my knees beside my bed and said these simple words, “God if you are real and if you give us children I promise to raise them in a Christian home.” During this same time period, my husband was struggling with not having fulfillment from pursuing the American Dream. He would see men at his workplace that had worked 30+ years and then would retire. They would buy a travel trailer or lake lot and in a couple years, he would hear that they had died. He said to himself, “there has to be more to life than this.” It was these two situations that helped us begin to pursue more purposeful living.

In my next blog, I will take you through our journey toward living a purposeful life.