When you come back from doing a year of serving people every single day and every single moment of every day and then you go home, things are rough. Being back in the Naperville area for the past month has been really difficult for me. The culture is different and my relationships have changed, but I want to focus on how my purpose has changed. We were told that when we left Youth Encounter we might get to our next step in life and feel like we have no purpose. Well, the people at Youth Encounter were very right. Since I do not have an organization I am working for these next four months, I don’t understand my purpose or my ministry. God has told me that my friends and family are my ministry. He has also given me great babysitting jobs and church jobs that I feel called to. He has given me these things, but I am still lacking a purpose.
I am finding myself doing the things that I am supposed to do (my jobs and hanging out with my family), but the rest of the time just looking at my “to do” list that seems so massive! This “to do” list is not just for the day, but it is a long list of things I want to do the next four months. In my free time, I look at these lists. At the moment, a lot of the stuff on the lists have to do with the World Race.
But since I do not have an official ministry with an organization, I am finding myself every day more and more focused on myself and I hate it. I am finding that I don’t seem to know how to serve people in the daily life without having an organization telling me my ministry. All I know how to do naturally is serve myself. I know that this natural tendency is why I don’t feel spiritually filled up a lot. I am being pulled to focus on the world instead of focus on God. I know this messes everything up. I can see how it negatively affects my relationships with my friends and my family and how it negatively effects my relationship with God. I know it’s not good.
I know I need to pray to God every day asking Him to humble me and to push my own needs aside. He has not called me to focus on myself 24/7. He has called me to do the exact opposite. How I have been slipping these past weeks is hard for me to accept, but it is the truth. I know that I need to find my security in my Savior’s truth instead of an organization’s. Organizations are great, but I need my purpose to be in the one who saved me because He is the one who will never fail me.
