Feeling like you have a Purpose

What does it feel like to have a purpose. Is it one purpose your whole life or is it built of many smaller ones with some larger ones in between? What happens to those purposes when you start a career, get married or have kids? What is your purpose?

Preparing for our move to Virginia those thoughts came through my mind, “Do I have a purpose here?” My main thoughts were I am here to fully support Brendan while is he is going through TBS. But otherwise than that I didn’t really feel like I was going for a specific purpose.

I think that’s part of why this move was so hard for me. Brendan had everything he’s been working towards here, and his career in the Marines is really just beginning. But for me coming here, I didn’t have anything that was just mine. My main responsibility is to make sure there is food in the house and a warm meal for him when he comes home. I guess I pay a few bills here and there but still.

“What am I doing here??”

NOT feeling like you have a purpose is depressing. Even still for the first 3 months after moving I just felt like I wasn’t really needed. I thought to myself, “I don’t have a job, I don’t have a degree or a career i’m working towards. What am I really needed for besides a warm meal?” I do really enjoy actually cooking and making fun meals, making the apartment all cute, cleaning it and all that fun wife stuff. But as most fun things go, it gets old after awhile.

After I got a nanny job here and life became naturally a little busier things got better. I kept thinking to myself, “Even though I don’t really feel like I have a specific purpose here, I know I am here for a reason. God will use me in some way.” But how do you find that? I am not just a person that can pick something out and do that, or have just stumbled upon something that changed my life and that’s my new purpose. I need reasoning and a motive behind it. I feel like most people would agree with me on that part.

I would have to say that this is harder for a military spouse. I say that because your entire life now, well for as long as your husband, or wife, is in the military, revolves around he and the military. Never about what kind of job YOU want,where YOU want to move and how YOU want to spend your time. It’s a little frustrating knowing that, and hard not to want to be selfish about it all. But the question still comes back… What is MY purpose as a military spouse?

I think I found a purpose. And whoever is reading this, you are reading it right now.

I totally didn’t know this at first, but his blog has become a purpose for me. It’s absolutely crazy.

Seriously. People have been asking me, “What made you want to start a blog?” And all I can say is, “I’m not really sure.”

You see, I thought about doing this whole blog while my husband and I were engaged, thinking it would be a good source of information for our family and friends to know what the heck we’re doing in the military. I thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it some more. Then I made a post on Facebook about the “Love your spouse challenge” and then it hit me! I had so many positive responses and loved writing it that I knew starting a blog would be the perfect outlet for me. And not just about where we are in military life but about what I am going through and the emotions of it all. I started researching the best ways to do it, what to write about and everything involved that I needed.

He did it. God has somehow been using this as a way to reach out to others that I don’t even know. It has been so incredible.

This is my 6th post, and it has been crazy to see what has become of it in only 3 short weeks! What I didn’t know was that God had this planned out all along. This whole experience of being married in the military and writing about it was going to impact others. Not just newly married couples in the same position as Brendan and I are in but literally across the world. People that I don’t even know have told me how this has impacted them and how they are so glad they aren’t the only ones who feel the same way I do!

The best thing about this blog is I get to keep doing it! This new “purpose” is not a short one where I move on to the next one and the next one. I will be working on this Life through the Journey as long as God allows me to. It’s also really cool that I have found that new purpose, and that is just for me. 

Sometimes I still feel like I don’t have a purpose. But that’s not the end of the world. I am here for a reason, a reason God intended, right now it is to reach out to others and impact them with what I am going through.

Romans 8:28 “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”