Purpose & Calling
I feel like I've missed my calling. I'm in my fifties and it feels too late.
“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.”
Joel wrote this to a people whose land had been devastated by a plague of locusts, an ecological disaster that consumed years of crops and labor. God's promise is not that the locusts did not happen but that he will work in the future to restore what was taken. He is a God who redeems time, not just moments.
“And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
The prodigal son spent years in the wrong place, wasting what he had been given. When he returned, the father did not say 'too late.' He ran. This is the nature of the God who redeems: he does not look at the years you spent away and calculate a diminished welcome. He runs toward the return, however late it comes.
A path forward
Write down what you would have done differently if you could go back, then ask what version of that thing is actually available to you now. Purpose does not always look the same at 50 as it would have at 30.
Talk to someone who found or shifted into their meaningful work after 40. Their story will challenge the assumption that the window has closed.
Identify one small step you can take this month toward the thing you feel you missed. Starting small is not giving up on the big thing; it is the only way the big thing ever begins.
Closing verse
“Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”
- Isaiah 43:18-19
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