Senior Year. The year when you move back to school and know the routine. You already have every curtain rod, lamp, rug, and picture frame. You know the drill...how to pack your things, where to nail the nails, the tricks to command strips......but something feels different.
It's that this is the year that people start asking....asking everything and anything about all the unknowns of life. "What are you going to do next year?" "Where do you want to live?" "Are you going to get your masters?" "Are you going to teach?" "What grade do you want to teach?" ...the list goes on. And as I process all of these questions, I always have to ask myself one single question, "What is the purpose of my life?"
We had a whole class devoted to resumes last week, and I had a small breakdown of "It's coming whether I'm ready or not...." I told someone about this day, and they said Tabitha you didn't just have A breakdown, you had THE breakdown that everyone has. There is a feeling of uncertainty and of unknown with every season ending and a new one beginning. But I have struggled with how am I best going to use my gifts and abilities to serve Him and bring Him the most glory. Even boiled down to what are my gifts and abilities and how should I use them? I have felt a sense of weariness of not having everything figured out, but on the other hand a sense of peace of knowing it's ok to walk through a season of unknown.
On the way home from teaching one day, I stopped by LifeWay. While looking through the shelves of all the books, I saw a small book not much bigger than an iPhone. The title was "Discovering God's Purpose for Your Life" by Beth Moore. I hesitated as I picked it up, thinking that this book must have been written for me and was the key I had been looking for...well I dove in and almost had finished the book before I decided to purchase it. The whole little book focused on one verse in Philippians.
"My determined purpose is that I may know Him, that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His person." - Philippians 3:10
Our determined purpose is to know God.
Your book, your life, is titled "Knowing God" and you are the author. With every season comes a different chapter, but the theme of that chapter is Knowing God. And with knowing God comes loving God and with loving God comes serving God. Beth states, "There is not one season in your life in which you cannot know Him. It does not exist. In every single season there is a fresh opportunity to know Christ."
In Philippians 3:8, Paul states "What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." The knowledge that Paul is talking about are fragments of who Christ is. Through every season and every chapter, through every experience in life, we gain more fragments of knowing Him, and our goal is to pull as many of those fragments together so that we may have a working knowledge of who God is. Beth writes, "But then one day when we see Him face to face, we will have all these little fragments laying out in front of us that we will bring before Him like pieces before an altar, and in a millisecond it will be made one piece....complete. And that is the goal."
So in this season of so many unknowns, my purpose is still to know him. To gain all the knowledge I can in this season, so that when I enter the next I can continue to put the pieces together, knowing one day it will be complete.
