Our "Why?"

​Jeremiah and I are thankful to have had the opportunity to share with several people over the last several weeks about why we’re headed to Eastern Europe. I wrote in my last post that our goal is to share with our new neighbors that they can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But what makes that goal worth uprooting our life?

The over-arching answer has to do with the “Why” of our life. Don’t we all wrestle with our purpose? What am I doing with my life, and what am I working towards? For a long time, I knew my purpose was to be a foster mom. 

I had a teacher in high school that said, “Why would I have kids when there are already so many who need a family?”. His perspective, paired with having close family friends who fostered, inspired me to be a foster mom. As I grew in my faith, I also discovered that the bible tells Christ followers to care for orphans and widows, and that having compassion for them is a way to share God’s love (James 1:27). Being foster parents opened our hearts to loving others more. We didn’t know how pivotal this would be in our lives. 

Once Jeremiah and I reached this goal, I found myself in a pit of depression. I had graduated college with two degrees, and we owned our first home by the time I was 21. We had remodeled our home and welcomed foster children into our spare rooms. I also found myself pregnant with my second daughter while navigating baby land with our first daughter. I had achieved my goal and fulfilled my purpose- white minivan and all- by the age of 24. But why wasn’t it enough, and why was I the saddest I had been in my life? 

God had asked Jeremiah and I to give Him complete authority in our life, but I was holding tight to what I thought my life was supposed to look like. I had worked so hard to get there after-all. I found myself absolutely wrecked and torn between wanting to submit to God and wanting to enjoy the life Jeremiah and I had built together. I needed help finding “Why” I would follow Jesus- the one who I claimed was the Lord of my life- into deeper waters. 

I was introduced to a Bible counselor who challenged my beliefs. She listened to me talk about who I thought I was and who I thought God was, and she challenged me to dig deeper into the Bible and develop a correct understanding of my relationship with the Creator of the Universe. In my mind, God was my Father who I needed to please. I thought He had a lot of expectations of me, and I was crumbling under the pressure I put on myself to do a good job of following Him. I had an incorrect view of God, and therefore an incorrect worldview. 

I learned that the Bible teaches that people are born separated from God. Because the first people on earth decided to disobey God, all the people that came after them no longer get to dwell harmoniously with the Creator. Contrary to my sub-conscious thinking, there is nothing that us people can do to please God enough that he would let us dwell with Him again. He is perfect and our imperfection keeps us from Him. 
The Good News is that God made a way for us to be with Him again. God became flesh and came to earth as a man to live the perfect life that we are incapable of. He sacrificed himself and paid the debt that we owe to Him, so that we can dwell with Him again. This is the Good News of Jesus! 

I began to have hope again. I finally understood what was wrong with me. I figured out why I was so sad-even though I didn’t want to be; and even though from the outside, I had nothing to be sad about. I was born separated from my Creator because of sin in the world. There would always be a hole in my life, something missing that I could never fix. And it wasn’t a problem that only I was facing. 

Every person, in every nation, in every socio-economic class, of every sexuality is searching for a purpose for their life and something to make them whole. I was no longer desperate to find a “Why” for my life because I realized what Jesus had done for me when he made a way for me to have a relationship with God. Jeremiah and I discovered that our purpose was to tell other people the Good News of Jesus so that they don’t have to live a life apart from God- without a purpose and unable to fill the void within.

We are thankful for the Christ followers and Bible scholars before us who have worked to prove that the Bible is without error, is incapable of having error, has the clarity to tell us everything we need to know about God and how to have a relationship with Him, and that it is the final authority by which we should live our lives. Without an absolute truth, how can we make sense of the world? Without a Creator who values and loves all life- every created thing- why would we sacrifice our comfort for the sake of other people? Without knowing that this sacred text is historically accurate and corroborated by secular records, how can we differentiate this truth from other “truths” written by man? Without a biblical worldview, what is the point of life? 

Our “Why” is to be thankful to God that He loves us and wants us. Because we know that Jesus sacrificed himself so that we can know God, we choose to worship Him with our life and tell others His Good News so that they don’t have to live without Him. While there are people in our hometown, Kentucky, and the rest of the United States who still need the hope of Jesus, there are Christ-followers here to share the Good News with them. God has asked us to share His word with all nations, so we are going to a place with little or no access to the hope that we have. 

​-Anna