searching & discovering

These past 9 months have been the most life changing. I was put on bedrest with Anna and life as I new it changed. I had a massive amount of time to sit alone in a hospital reading and thinking about life. I found myself! I began to see my true purpose in life. The key word being true.  And it's simple.  My true purpose in life is to love. To not only love those who it is easy to love but to love those who I have no reason to love. I am beginning to see the world in a whole new light. I'm not out to change or save it one person at a time. I'm just here doing what God has called me to do......LOVE.

I was raised to fear everything. I was raised that people are always out to get you and take your stuff. I was raised that stuff (money, a nice car, a nice house, nice clothes) was the most important thing in life. And the pursuit of the stuff ( the job) had no other purpose than to get more stuff. In other words I was raised to work my butt off in a job that I might not like in order to get stuff to show people how hard of a worker I am and to rub it in their face that I was not in poverty because I worked HARD. 

Slowly, throughout college, I began to question this outlook on life. I took the first step when I decided to major in psychology. Next came the opportunity to work at a State Psychiatric Hospital. While there I learnt the true power if love. Love is truly transforming!

Being put on bedrest was a blessing in the form of despair. It forced me to slow down. I was going through life without really living. It gave me the opportunity to literally sit back and look at what I was doing and what I should be doing. I decided that staying home to raise my children to be respectable and loving people was going to be my number one priority. 

The past five months of the fulltime job of "stay at home mom" have been challenging, rewarding and eye opening. I feel that I am growing right along side my kids. I am finding myself as they are discovering this wonderful place called earth. 

I've been thinking a lot about becoming a therapist. However, I feel a great need to incorporate spirituality into the therapy. As a person of faith who has suffered from depression and anxiety I have experienced first hand how important it is to go to a faith based clinic to seek help. I began to feel even stronger about this point while reading a book by the late M. Scott Peck entitled "Further Along the Road Less TRaveled."

So, I have heard the call, fought with the call, turned away from the call only to in the end accept the call. I'm going to seminary to major in Pastoral Care and Counseling. I feel a deep yearning, that I can't really explain, to work with a faith based shelter. I have found that oftentimes those suffering the most cannot afford the cost of a therapy session. I want to help. I want to be that person they can go to for guidance without having to worry about the cost. 

I have wrestled with this decision a lot the past couple of months. A part of me wants to go to an awesome grad school and become the best psychology professor EVER. But a bigger part of me knows that that is not what I have been commissioned to do. 

I know it is something that is said over and over but I am going to say it again; "each of us has been blessed with a gift."  God blessed each of us with a gift (talent, passion) in order that we may use it to be a blessing to others.