Good morning…

“I liked your message,” wrote my 22 year old son who is ministering to college students for a year in Australia. “The steps of discerning God’s purpose/plan for our lives are challenging. I came across this study worksheet that looks into ‘What is God’s purpose for me?’ It creates a few solid purposes that we all have as image bearers of God.”

I checked out the suggested worksheet and what three purposes do we all share? To know and worship God, to become increasingly more like Christ, and to make the LORD known throughout all of the earth. With his email in mind, I went to bed pondering my wise son’s final comment, “God’s desire is that we would live for those three purposes, and how we do that (career, marriage, kids, city, etc.) is secondary.”

Then God woke me just now filled with this thought: “Might ‘how we do that’ actually be quite primary?”

Saturating my mind, I envision a large loom hand-strung by God. The same solid threads running vertical, top to bottom, are secured from the beginning of time for each person who walks this earth. Know and worship God. Become increasingly more like Christ. Make the LORD known throughout all of the earth.

Then the multicolored threads held in the hand of God are dyed with our own special personality, our own unique passions, and our own personal potential. Over our lifetime, God weaves our true colors up then down, in then out, back then forth. It is a primary matter that I weathered my teenage angst by writing in the middle of the night and that daily journaling was my own personal lifeline for over twenty years before God called forth my written word ministry. It is a primary matter that I married my husband, a strong man of faith who strives daily to live out God’s purposes for his own life. It is a primary matter that we endured four years of infertility and four miscarriages to give birth to these four, 0ne-of-a-kind kids, now investing in their young adult faith. It is a primary matter to God that we live in Atlanta, GA (this is a story for another day). These personal details divinely dyed into the ball of yarn named “my life” are not secondary. They make me who I am and shape how God touches the world through me.

We all are designed to know and worship God, to become increasingly more like Christ, and to make the LORD known throughout all of the earth and, at the same time, we are made to live out a colorful, conversational relationship with Christ, up then down, in then out, back then forth, every day of our ordinary life. How do you see these three God-given purposes securing the career you choose, the relationships you cherish, and the community to which you minister?

Somewhere along the way, God wove into my tapestry this “life verse”: Do not neglect the spiritual gift within you, [that special endowment] which was intentionally bestowed on you [by the Holy Spirit]…Practice and work hard on these things; be absorbed in them [completely occupied in your ministry], so that your progress will be evident to all. Pay close attention to yourself [concentrate on your personal development] and to your teaching; persevere in these things [hold to them], for as you do this you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you (1 Timothy 4:14-16, AMP).

…Sue…