Thirty and Searching

I’m 30, mother of two, wife, science teacher, and right now, I’m at a crossroad. I took a leap of faith and applied for a two-year child-rearing leave from my job. I explained in an earlier post why I decided not to pursue medicine, and as far as I can tell, I don’t have the heart of a physician anyway: seeing patient after patient all day, prescribing meds, being on-call at a hospital for 24 hours-not my cup of tea. So I guess you can call this a mid-life crisis of some sort. I also wanted to take an opportunity to breastfeed without the stress of pumping at work and relying on coworkers to cover my classes during pumping sessions, and staying hydrated well enough to keep up my milk supply but not so much that I’m leaving my classes every half hour to pee.

Anyway, I’m excited and terrified about this 2-year break from teaching because I’m going to attempt to do this writing thing full-time and get published. My husband and I launched a couples ministry this year and I’ve been writing the blog post for our website. We have big dreams for it: couples’ retreats, marriage counseling, podcasts, webinars, etc. It’s exciting, but still terrifying because I’ve become so used to focusing on a nine to five job, and I have so many doubts about the future. Some days I wake up feeling exhilarated about the possibilities ahead of us, and some days I wake up thinking: What if this isn’t the path I should be on? What if this thing isn’t successful? What if I’m just not brilliant enough, tough enough, talented enough? When those days come, God usually has to remind me of one or all of the lessons I’ve described bel and I want to share them with everyone who’s trying to find their life’s purpose and passion:

1. Work to your God-given gifts. There’s something that you love to do so much that you wake up every day thinking about it, and not a day goes by that you don’t do it. It could be playing a musical instrument, writing, teaching, whatever it is, you love it so much that you would do it even if you weren’t ever going to get paid for it. Focus on finding out what that particular thing is, and once you know what it is, go to work on perfecting it.

2. Grind hard. This is how you perfect your craft. Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers” is a great book that discusses a principle called the 10,000 hour rule. Everyone in history who’s been great at something practiced and spent hours working on their craft-the magic number being 10,000 hours. If you’ve spent at least that much time on your gift, whatever it is, it’s only a matter of time before something great happens and you get your breakthrough.

3. Be patient. Time is our greatest enemy. As a results-driven person, I get anxious and discouraged if I put in 100 percent and don’t see the results I expected. But that’s the kind of mindset that will yield only short-term results and success. Just keep being consistent and in the end your efforts will pay off.

4. No excuses. Everyone has obstacles to contend with: you may be a single mom, or pregnant, or you may have a learning disability, limited finances, or no support system. Instead of letting these things prevent you from reaching your goal, use them as motivation to be creative in carving out time in the day to work on pursuing your goals and researching ways to improve yourself. If it was easy to achieve great things, everyone would do it. As it is, very few people pursue their goals long enough to reach them. So no excuses!

5. Trust in God. He knows your deepest longings, your goals and dreams. He knows the purpose He had in mind when He created you
. So when certain doors close and other opportunities open up, remeber that it’s His hand guiding you.

Please don’t think that I’ve got it together. I wrote this post because I’m still in the process of applying these lessons and sharing them with my readers gives me accountability to practice what I preach. I want to reach my goals, and I want you to reach yours too. I’ll keep you guys posted on my progress, so feel free to do the same. Until next time!