The Thing About Purpose…

Being a writer is a lot harder than I thought.

If I want to make something of my words, then I need to think carefully about what I’m trying to say. Am I conveying the right tone? Am I boring? Am I making any sense? Will anyone a hundred years from now (assuming the Lord tarries) want to read this? Am I creating anything new and beautiful, or just filling a space on the internet that hardly anyone will ever read?

The self-doubt is suffocating. As someone who constantly compares my work with those of everyone else, creating art and putting it out there is just as difficult as trying not to compare.

I’m constantly thinking of writing…but am I writing to best serve you, or am I writing to (gasp!) promote me?

Being a therapist is a lot harder than I thought.

(As a disclaimer, no, I am not one…yet…but it feels like I am most days.)

Listening can be exhausting. Trying to help other people understand themselves and therefore understand why they are feeling the way they are feeling, and then watching them fall, is discouraging. Spending eight hours of the day coaching and encouraging and thinking about the people you are trying to help, only to have them slap the hand that offers them hope, hurts. You hurt because they hurt. Their suffering gives you anxiety and they meet you in your dreams, mostly because no matter how hard you try to leave work at work, it somehow always manages to find you the moment you let your guard down.

This all coming from someone who is a therapist in training.

Being a Christian is a lot harder than I thought.

Christians will know that being a Christian is not always easy. Who in the world wants to love their enemies? Who in their right mind gives up the pleasures of the world in exchange for things we cannot see? And, honestly, if I wasn’t a Christian, it would look crazy to me, too. Popular culture says abstaining from partying is lame, and not sleeping around is prudish, and putting others before yourself isn’t “self-love” and therefore, offensive. (And may I ask, what isn’t considered offensive these days?)

But, unlike the writer and the therapist—the parts of me that I so strongly identify with, the parts that are constantly calling for attention and begging for me to give and give and give all that I am until I’m lying on the wood floor on a Sunday evening, totally used up—being a Christian is different.

Because living as a Christian means I’m not living for myself.

I’m not overwhelmed and exhausted and spent at the end of the day.

Unlike being a writer, I’m not promoting myself.

Unlike being a therapist, I’m not there to heal anyone.

Rather, Christ is being promoted, and I’m the one being healed.

When I come into the Lord’s Presence, I am closer to who I’m supposed to be. I can put on a front for my co-workers and friends and even family but when I’m sitting there, just me and the Lord, everything else gets stripped away. While this should feel vulnerable, maybe even uncomfortable, I don’t run from it. In fact, I want to stay that way for as long as I can, wrapped in a covering of light and protection. I’m aware that everything I identify with, everything I think I am, has vanished and it’s just me in all my humanness—but nothing has ever felt so freeing.

It’s a wonder that we spend so much of our lives trying to build ourselves, only to go into the Presence of our Creator and ask for the weight to be lifted. Our hands shake until He moves his own over ours to steady. We frantically search for meaning until He lifts our head so we can see Him.

The closer I get to Jesus, the closer I am to being who I’m supposed to be.

No matter what else I do in this life, I want to walk as closely as I can to Him, so I never forget who I am. I hope and pray you decide the same.

I promise you, nothing will ever feel so right.

I can’t wait to hear from you,

McKenna