Why Every Season Matters
How every moment is part of your purpose.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).
Have you ever felt like your life is on repeat? Every day the same old thing, and the question “Am I missing God’s intention for my life?” rattles around inside your head like loose change?
I know I have felt that way.
Intend means “to have in mind as a purpose or goal” and “to design for a specified use or future.”
So when you think about God’s intention for your life, it’s twofold:
- He has an ultimate purpose or goal in mind for you.
- He designed you to carry out specific works during your lifetime.
In Matthew 22, Jesus tells the Pharisees that the whole of the law could be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind and loving your neighbor as yourself. In other words, in every season of life, God intends for you to love him and to share his love with the world. That is your ultimate and unchanging purpose!
But what about the second part of God’s intention for your life, the calling to good works that he has laid out in advance for you to do during your lifetime?
The answer lies in the life of Jesus himself.
The bulk of the Gospels is focused on the last three years of Jesus’s life, but he lived for thirty years before his public ministry began. The vast majority of that time was likely spent using his gifts as a carpenter and businessman to serve Nazareth’s everyday, ordinary people. He went to the temple, worked, prayed, obeyed, listened, and trusted. He loved his family and his neighbors, and most of all, his heavenly Father.
Jesus shared God’s love throughout his entire life—this was an unchanging purpose. But while the calling of his early years looked different from the calling of his later years, it wasn’t any less worthy or less essential to God’s intention for him.
Similarly, God’s intention for you will take a lifetime to live out. Today, your calling—those specific works prepared in advance for you to do—might feel obscure, small, or somehow less essential in your current season of life. Amid work or job loss, singleness or marriage, children or empty nest, routine or transition, it can be difficult to see your calling as valuable. But in whatever season you find yourself, it is worthy because God is using it to carry out his unchanging purpose for you: to love your family, your neighbors, and most of all your heavenly Father.
Take some time this week to sit down and journal about what season you feel you are in. Do you find yourself minimizing its eternal value? If so, ask God to reshape your internal narrative to match his eternal narrative. Pray about how you can love and honor God in your daily life and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal how you can love the people in front of you today.
Hannah Fordice is a writer, advocate, trainer, and founder of House of Faith and Freedom. She resides in Minnesota with her husband and three fur children. @hfordice
Scripture quotation is from the New International Version of the Bible.