Living for the Purpose You Were Born
Whenever God calls us to deeper, it usually involves a few things. First, radical obedience, second, bold faith, and third, being content with having limited understanding. To go deeper in God, we must lose all of what we were, all of who we were, to become all He created us to be before time began.
“Birthmarks”
I was the firstborn for both my parents. I came from a union that was controversial. My mother was, at the time, an uneducated teen with a bad reputation, and my father, the prized son of a well known and respected family of their community. They did not belong together. Many people fought the union to its core, hoping to dissuade my father from seeing my mother. They did eventually break up, but not before God’s plan came to pass, I was conceived.
My birth was a catalyst for many things, it began a series of events that I can now say was divinely orchestrated by God. For my mother’s family, I was the first person to get a high school education. As might be expected, I was also the first person to attend any post-secondary institution. My mother’s parents were cane workers. My grandfather lived in a boarding house on the sugar plantation where he worked. It was one room, with both parents and seven (7) children. Though education is a good tool, it was never a big priority for them. They did the best they could with what they had; the goal was to survive. At an early age, every child was taught to work, my mother being the first of those children to learn as she was also the firstborn. To eat one must work, slaving in the sun for bread was a way of life. Poverty and lack were also a way of life.
My maternal grandparents never owned anything, not even the roof over their heads. It was my birth that brought their first homeownership. As my mother recalls to me, when I was born, my paternal grandparents didn’t want me to live where my mother grew up, so they gave my mother a piece of land to build a house on for us to live. Over time, my mother petitioned for more land so she could house her parents and siblings. After much persuasion, my paternal grandmother granted her request. To this day, that land is home when I revisit Jamaica.
From the age of my adolescence, I sensed that there was something different about me. I carried a burden on me. No one gave it to me, nor was it ever spoken, I can only explain it as a “knowing”. A sense that somewhere beyond the board house I grew up in, the poverty I saw around me, the lack of education from my mother’s legacy and the pain of sometimes being among the have-nots, there was more. But how would my outcome be different from the family I grew up in? For some time, I believed that it was my mother’s relationship with my father that made the difference for me, somewhere in their playful romance, I was conceived. I wasn’t planned for, no one was prepared for me. I was, by all estimation, an accident. But I was not an accident. I never knew, but it was God’s hand on my life the whole time.
In the community I grew up, you didn’t need to look far to see hopelessness around you. I saw lack, and I often felt it too, it loomed in the atmosphere like a thick fog, and I grew up among the more fortunate children. I had a father that was present and active in my life, a mother that cared about my education even though she had none, and a family that believed in me. It’s interesting, as a child, I never knew how much my circumstances and surroundings affected my way of thinking until I became an adult. I never understood how growing up in lack and poverty affected my life. How it created a culture of fear in me.
I grew up with the mindset that success means getting a good education and a great job. I thought I was well on my way when I graduated from university at the age of 21, and right after got my first job in an office at an insurance company. I wish I had a picture to show you how proud my mother was when I got this job. Not because it was prestigious, but, in our family, it meant that one of us had made it out past the walls of the community and all it represented. I was so happy with this job. It paid the bills, it provided for my mom and me, and we were able to buy food with ease. That was an achievement for us, it truly was. I grew up knowing that, in order to live, you must work, it was the only way to survive. We didn’t have a rich relative coming by to give us a big inheritance. My motivation to getting any job was to be able to afford a decent life and “have things” that I never had growing up, like an abundance of clothes to wear, my own choice of shoes every day, getting my hair done whenever I wanted. These things, though simple, were goals for me. I lacked the consistency of these things growing up and so for me, being able to have them in my adult life was my achievement. A job made that possible, so I held on to one for dear life.
When I immigrated to Canada in 2010, my location changed but my mindset didn’t. I quickly found a job at a local retail store selling window treatments. Working was my answer to lack. To have, one must work. And so, that I did, and I prided myself in it.
With a mindset like this, you can only imagine what happened in January 2018 when I started to feel the tug on my heart to walk away from my 9 to 5. It was terrifying. I remember asking God why He was calling me to suffer. I was honest with Him, I lived in lack my whole childhood; lack of clothes, lack of food. For me, this job guaranteed that I didn’t have to feel the pain of wanting the basics and not having it. I remember the voice of the Father came to me saying, “Debra, your perspective is wrong, you will not be struggling, you will be BUILDING.”
The problem was, I had no desire to build anything, I had no dreams or aspirations of being the owner of anything. My idea of success was a good education and a good job, and I had both. Why would I leave my successful life to build on my own?
I will tell you this, if you feel the pain of lack long enough, you become a slave to it. For me, the idea of leaving my 9 to 5 and living without a steady income was me going back to that place of pain I felt when I was in lack. I didn’t know it then, but my personal definition of failure was being in lack, being unable to afford the necessities of life.
There are lessons that you will never learn on the sidelines, you must launch into the deep. Dear reader, this was one of those lessons. I never knew that the short-sighted goal to just work and pay bills was a product of a slave mindset. That the aspiration to ‘own’ comes from one who is free enough in thought to believe they can do more than just work; they can also BUILD.
To say I was in bondage was an understatement, I was in mental slavery. Educated but ignorant, free but living in shackles. I wasn’t in a cane field like my grandparents, but the spirit of poverty and the mind of a slave still had me bound. It’s funny how we believe education frees us, but education without spiritual liberation makes you an educated slave. This revelation was what I was beginning to find out in my own life. So, by leaving my 9-5, God was in fact inviting me to freedom, but what happens when freedom to God looks like failure to you?
Editor: Abigail Chin
