Am I In The Right Place?

Have you ever been worried that you missed it?

I mean, do you worry that you missed your place in the world, your purpose, your calling? Do you ask, “What if I’m not making a difference in the world?”

I’ve heard these fears voiced not only by myself, but by the people around me—young adults still trying to find our place in the world. There are so many decisions to be made during the college years—what do I major in? What profession do I pursue? What does God want me to do; where does He want me to go? After graduating, these questions continue, sometimes in the form of wondering if you made the right choice after all.

I’d like to suggest something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently:

Maybe it doesn’t matter where you are.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if you majored in English or chemical engineering or in education. Maybe God cares less about the fact that you chose a specific path—maybe He can meet and guide you on any path you choose.

I think we limit God when we believe that He can only work through us if we find the one, specific profession or city or spouse or volunteer opportunity that He wants for us, and we wait for our lives to start until we find that one thing/place/position. Or we wait until we have the relationship/kids/freedom that we want. We wait until we graduate/get married/retire. Eventually, we turn our whole lives into a waiting game, waiting for the door to open, for the sign from God, for the message that we’re doing our right thing.

I’d like to suggest this: I believe that as a Christian, life is less about being in the right place and more about doing what you can with what you have. I think that as millennials, we’re drawn to these stories of people quitting their jobs and traveling the world and starting nonprofits in foreign countries and while all of that is wonderful—if everyone did these crazy, glamorous things, we’d have no one holding down the fort at home.

Some of us are supposed to work 9-5 jobs and only travel a few states over to visit our family. Some of us are supposed to live a life that would never make a great movie, but that ripples with impact and love for the people we know, for the people who sit in our kitchen at dinnertime.

After all, every single Christ follower is called to “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness” (1 Timothy 6:11). And we can pursue righteousness and Godliness and faith and love and endurance and gentleness in our homes and our work and our relationships. We can pursue these things in the ordinary, mundane parts of life, the commute to work and cooking dinner and folding laundry and helping your friend fix their computer.

Did you know that recent scientific studies reveal that one person can only really, truly be close to five people at a time? I don’t like this statistic. I want to have dozens and dozens of friends. But reluctantly, I’ve seen how true this is. We just don’t have time in our adult lives to be heart-level close to more than five people at a time.

And yet with those five people, we have an opportunity to love in a steady, constant, non-glamorous kind of way. The kind of love that is work, slow and steady work. And isn’t that enough? “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). In 1st Corinthians, Paul reminds us again and again that we are called to love. This is true for me and it is true for you.

You have not missed the great purpose for your life.

My mom chose to spend her 20s raising my brother and me and being a wife. She didn’t leave the country or work at a start-up or get a degree in her twenties—millennial markers of achievement. And yet I’m profoundly grateful that my mom’s calling was to stay home with my brother and me. I know I have been uniquely shaped by the time and energy she poured into me, and I know now what I didn’t as a child—that she sacrificed time and money and energy in the work of love, and I am different and better for that.

Whether you are currently getting your degree, or you chose not to go to college, or you can’t figure out what to study, or you wonder if you’ve picked the right grad program or married the right person or you wonder if you’ll ever get married at all—your calling is where you are, doing what you are doing, loving the people around you.

You see, I don’t know what the specific calling on your life is. But I do know this—you are called to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).

Release yourself from the worry that you’re not doing enough, that you are not enough, that you’ve missed your path in life. Because I know that no matter what city you’re living in, regardless of your relationship status, despite the work or career you’ve chosen, you can act, love, and walk. In this magnificent world, the best thing we could ever choose is Christ, and He is not limited to one specific path. He is working in the details of your life; in your commute to work, in your interactions with your co-workers, in the prayers your pray in the middle of the night.

Rest in Him. When all else falters and fades, Christ remains.