Why am I Here?

Purpose empowers. About 15 years ago I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. The book completely shifted my paradigm and unleashed my desire for understanding my purpose—a journey long overdue.


I remember the day I was old enough to calculate the difference between my age and the date my parents got married. Let’s just say, it was less than nine months! (Sorry, Mom and Dad, if I’ve blown your cover.) This discovery came about the same time that my parents took teenage foster children into our home. The chaos created by troubled teens consumed my parents’ time and attention, and I began to question my place in our family. I was 10 years old trying to find clarity in the midst of confusion. Connecting the dots between being and unplanned baby and feeling invisible resulted in my believing a lie: I am a mistake. I carried this belief with me through the next 20 years.

Living with a lie rendered me powerless. For 20 years I floundered looking for satisfaction in getting married, having a baby, building a new home, finding the right job, collecting the right friends, networking with the right people, adorning my outer beauty to get noticed. But, none of it quenched my desire for true satisfaction and contentment.

Steven Covey explained how everyone desires purpose and meaning. As I devoured the book and turned to the Bible for meaning, I shifted my paradigm and started a journey of change. Psalm 139 showed me I was not invisible and I am not a mistake.

Psalm 139:13-16 (Good News Version) says,

“You created every part of me; you put me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because you are to be feared…when my bones were being formed, carefully put together in my mother’s womb, when I was growing there in secret, you knew that I was there—you saw me before I was born. The days allotted to me had all been recorded in your book, before any of them ever began.”

Really? He decided that I was going to be born and He established a specific purpose for me? I felt a sense of freedom. The next step—discover that purpose. ..

Silence is Golden

In September 2009, I travelled to Nairobi, Kenya, as part of a short-term mission team. The experience changed me in ways I never expected it would. Mission trip change is a bit cliché, I know. A person sees and experiences things she would not anywhere in her own life and it moves her to action in the midst of the trip. The truth is that most mission trip change is cut short once re-entry occurs. But, my re-entry into life’s daily grind brought with it questions that eventually led me to put down my writing pen.

While each of the team members accepted the responsibility of being an ambassador for our African friends, as a writer, I felt compelled to keep the story alive with my written words. I felt compelled to somehow move people to action with the stories about real people with real names and real lives. For a while the story and my purpose seemed alive as I wrote the captions for the photographs that hung in the Witness Mathare gallery show in January 2010. Soon afterward I became frustrated with writing and I gave up.

Maybe it takes a bout of silence for a writer to understand why she writes. In an article entitled “Why Do Writers Write?” (Huff Post, 2009), Mark Coker explains, “Writers, after all, are artists, and artists are compelled to express themselves, even if only to an audience of one.” As I read the article, the words “audience of one” stood out like a big red stop sign in the middle of a desert road. Writing became difficult because it was no longer about pleasing God but about impressing the audience.

Writing is my oxygen. I would wake up every morning with the sole purpose of writing and be satisfied for the rest of my life. The pen is the conduit through which the thoughts tumbling around in my head move to the visual place on paper where I can gain clarity. I lost the honest writing from the heart and obsessed over finding something to say just to say it—so I could be heard.

What I realize today is my writing is about making me come alive…molding me into the woman God designed me to be…and letting Him bring the right audience to learn from the words I write.