This piece is part of a six part series talking about what it looks like to live as Wild-Hearted Women. There are so many voices telling us what we have to do and who we have to be in order to have a life worth living. But the Lord has called us to something higher, He has invited us to live with a wild-hearted freedom that can only be found when our lives are hidden in Him. I’ve invited five friends to write about finding beauty and meaning in the small moments of life, and stepping into what the Lord is calling you to do today.
I love to scroll through social media and see all the fantastic things that my friends and family are doing with their lives. There always comes a moment when I start to wish that my life was like those tiny 4×4 squares on my phone. That I could slip into that person’s shoes and spend my life doing something significant, something that really impacted those around me. These thoughts of comparison never do anything positive for me, but instead, they cause me to go through my life with a fine-tooth comb and pick out all the things that I wish I could change. We live in a world that praises the unusual, the complex, and the hard to attain. There are countless tv shows about transformations or finally making it big. But you’d never see a show about everyday life as a mom or about what it’s like to be a postal worker. Ours is a world where people are constantly longing to escape their reality, to trade a couple of hours for the chance to pretend at another life. But what would happen if we decided to not buy the lie that our lives were something that we needed to escape from? What would happen if we no longer listened when the world said we had to be a certain way to live a meaningful life?
Your life already has meaning right here and right now. Not years down the road when you can finally check everything off your five-year life plan, but right this second. Whether you’re changing diapers, running a company, serving food, or saving lives, your life has meaning. God wants to come into your daily life and show you what it looks like to live in His wild-hearted freedom. To be so focused on Him that the things of this world fade from view. He wants us to live in the knowledge that we are already living a life full of purpose and meaning because it’s Him and His love that gives our work purpose and our lives worth.
Our world is obsessed with an either/or mentality towards life. You’re either extroverted, or you’re introverted. You’re either frugal, or you throw your money around. You’re either a city person, or you’re a country person. When we live our lives this way, always trying to figure out which side of the line we should be on, we’ll slowly feel our joy starting to fade away. We become constricted by all the things we can and can’t be.
The beauty of following the Lord is that He frees us from that way of thinking. We don’t have to try and figure out who we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to live our lives. He’s already told us who we are in Him. Once we’re living as beloved children of God, we get the opportunity to grow into who He has created us to be. We don’t have to slide into whatever niche the world tells us to be a part of because we were made for so much more. We were made to live a life that’s wild and free, to live with wild-hearted abandon, always running towards the things of the Father. We aren’t meant to live either/or lives but this/and lives. We can love people and disagree with them. We can live a quiet life and impact others. We can follow the Lord and live in the wild freedom that gives us. The way that God has called us to live doesn’t revolve around a line in the sand that the world is constantly erasing and redrawing; it revolves around His word and His love for us.
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Micah 6:8
God doesn’t wait for extraordinary moments to impact His children’s lives; He meets us in everyday life. And it’s that meeting – that coming close – that makes the ordinary extraordinary. Don’t spend your whole life waiting for your life to change from being plain to being remarkable. That Princess Diaries moment (you know the one where she finds out that she’s not just some artist’s daughter but is actually a princess) will probably never happen to you are to me, and spending our whole lives pinning for that is a sure-fire way to waste them. Jesus’ disciples were ordinary people, and as they lived their lives with Christ, they witnessed and did extraordinary things. The same is true for us. We shouldn’t wait for someone to tell us that our lives are worthy; we should already know that because we live in the Lord’s truth.
God created you to live the life that you have at this very moment, and He set you on the road that you’re walking now. God doesn’t make ordinary things, which means that your life is far from boring. And when we’re running after Him, tuning our hearts to sing His praise, and seeking out His leading every day, we’ll soon realize that our lives could never be ordinary when we’re walking with our Lord. Let’s not get caught in the web of comparison that the world keeps spinning for us. Instead, let’s live in the truth that the life God has called us to live is worthy and full of impactful everyday moments. Every moment of your life has meaning, both big and small. Don’t write your life off because it doesn’t measure up to the world’s standards. Instead, measure it by what the Lord has said and pause to see that sometimes the most extraordinary things take place in the quiet moments in our lives.
Simply Katherina 