The Gift I Never Had to Find
On grief, permission, and the difference between what happens to us and what's already in us
Many of the questions I've probably asked God more than any other over the last several months is this:
What am I supposed to do with my life?
What am I supposed to do now that the life I planned has changed?
What do I actually want to do now?
What do I actually want out of life?
How do I want to spend the days I have left on this earth?
What is my actual purpose?
What would you, God, want me to do with my time here?
I've prayed it.
Journaled it.
Talked it through with friends.
Circled it in coaching sessions.
Spent countless hours in therapy discussing it.
Waited for some grand revelation that would finally make everything click.
It’s interesting how abruptly your perspective of future shifts when someone who you expected to live many more years is gone. My perspective slowly shifted after I lost my grandparents one by one. It shifted harder after I lost my dad, but losing a spouse at 44 has a way of creating a shift so seismic that you know things will never be the same again.
Death makes time feel different.
Before Joe died, I thought about the future the way I think most of us do. There were things we’d eventually do. Places we’d eventually go. Seasons we’d eventually reach. The kids would grow up, and we’d become empty nesters. We’d have more time. Maybe we’d travel more. Maybe we’d build something new. There was always this unspoken assumption that there would be a later.
…and then there wasn’t.
At least not the later I had planned.
I think that’s part of why I’ve wrestled so much with purpose since then. Once you’ve learned firsthand that the number of days isn’t guaranteed, it becomes much harder to casually hand them away.
I don’t want to simply fill my life.
I want to steward it, and well.
The wrestle has been my assumption that I needed to figure out the one big thing I was supposed to do with it.
The calling.
The assignment.
The thing that would finally make all of my experiences make sense.
Looking back, I don't think God was withholding the answer - I was asking the wrong questions.
The Thing I’ve Always Known
I've never actually been confused about what I'm good at. I've always known. I read numbers almost like they're telling a story. I love taking complicated things and making them simple. I build systems without really trying.
Give me a messy process, an unfinished idea, a spreadsheet that makes no sense, a business that's grown faster than its structure, or a person with twenty thoughts they can't untangle, and something in me immediately starts organizing the pieces.
I don't have to force it. It's just how my brain works, and the funny thing is, this didn’t start in business.
When the kids were little I embraced the idea of being the chaos coordinator of our household. Joe traveled so much with work, I was often left home with the four kids, navigating the challenges of a big family alone.
There were meals to plan, groceries to buy, school schedules to manage, practices and games to get to, homework, housework, laundry, appointments, birthday parties, permission slips, and evening routines that somehow never looked exactly the same from one day to the next.
Four different children.
Four different personalities.
Four different sets of needs, interests, strengths, struggles, schedules and dreams.
…and somehow, we made it work.
I look back on that time with such fondness. We squeezed every bit we could out of those days. Life was loud, and full, and exhausting, and wonderful. Somewhere inside all of the logistics, I was also desperately trying to make sure each child felt seen - to encourage their individual ideas and giftings and create enough structure around our family that there was room for each of them to become who they were becoming.
Did I always get it right? Absolutely not, but gosh if I didn’t try.
I see now how that chaos coordinator became a big part of my identity as a mom. I embraced it with pride, even while privately struggling to make it all work and trying to carve out enough space to remember that I was a person outside of motherhood too.
At the time, I certainly didn’t think of any of that as a ‘gift’.
It was just life.
It was just what needed to be done…so I did it.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons our gifts can be so difficult to recognize. We assume a gift should feel extraordinary to us…but what if it doesn't?
What if some of the clearest evidence of how God wired us is found in the things we do almost instinctively?
The thing other people find overwhelming that makes your brain come alive.
The problem everyone else keeps staring at that you immediately want to start solving.
The conversation where someone says, ‘How did you see that?’, and you genuinely don’t know how to explain it because you just…did.
Maybe the things that come naturally to us don’t feel remarkable because we’ve never known what it’s like to be without them.
People often talk about finding your gift as though it's buried somewhere deep inside you, waiting to be discovered. That hasn't been my experience. Mine has been sitting in plain sight for years.
The Question Underneath the Question
The real struggle wasn't identifying it.
The struggle was deciding what, or who, it was for.
For a long time I thought my gift had to match the hardest thing I'd ever lived through. As though my deepest pain had become the job description.
I survived something devastating, so perhaps the purpose of surviving it was to help other people survive it too…and again, I don’t think that season was wrong. But I’m beginning to understand that what happens to us and what God has placed in us aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Our experiences shape us. They deepen us. They teach us things we couldn’t have learned any other way. But, they don’t necessarily define the full scope of what we’re here to do.
Maybe grief didn’t give me my gifts, maybe it changes the way I use them.
Maybe trauma didn’t create my ability to sit with people in complicated places, maybe it deepened my compassion when I do.
Maybe losing everything I thought my future would be didn’t give me a brand new purpose, maybe it stripped away enough of the noise for me to finally start paying attention to what had been there all along.
That’s a very different story, and lately I've started wondering...What if God wasn't asking me to become someone different? What if He's simply been asking me to steward the person He already created?
That question has undone me, because it forces me to look backward. Not at my grief. Further back than that.
Back to the business Joe and I built together.
Back to the years of bookkeeping.
Back to managing a household full of six very different humans.
Back to consulting with contractors.
Back to helping friends organize impossible decisions.
Back to conversations about businesses and books and ministries and careers and ideas that weren’t mine, but that I immediately wanted to help someone figure out how to build.
Back to sitting over coffee while someone rambled for an hour and then hearing myself say, "Okay...I think I know what's happening here."
I've been doing this my whole life.
Not coaching.
Not bookkeeping.
Not consulting.
Not motherhood.
Not business ownership.
Those are just the settings. The common thread has always been clarity. I help people see what they can't quite see for themselves.
I take pieces, and look for the whole.
Sometimes it's in their finances.
Sometimes it's in their business.
Sometimes it's in the story they're telling themselves.
Sometimes it’s in a process that isn’t working.
Sometimes it's in the dream they can't figure out how to build.
Sometimes it’s simply helping someone hear what they’ve been saying all along.
Different conversations, different seasons, different settings - same wiring.
Breadcrumbs, Not Burning Bushes
…and somewhere in the middle of all this, another realization has quietly started surfacing.
Maybe people don't need as much help finding their gifts as we've led them to believe.
Maybe they already know.
Maybe they've always known.
Maybe the evidence has been scattered throughout their lives in a thousand ordinary moments they’ve never thought to count.
Maybe what's actually keeping them stuck isn't confusion.
It's permission.
Permission to stop chasing someone else's version of purpose.
Permission to stop believing that meaningful work has to look impressive.
Permission to stop apologizing for what comes naturally.
Permission to believe that the thing they've always discounted because it feels "too easy" might actually be the very thing God intends to use.
I wonder how often we ask God to reveal our purpose, while simultaneously dismissing the evidence He’s already placed throughout our lives. We want the burning bush - meanwhile, He’s been leaving breadcrumbs for decades.
I'm not saying that's true for everyone, I'm saying it was true for me.
And if it was true for me...I have to wonder how many other people have spent years asking God to reveal something He quietly revealed a long time ago.
Maybe you don’t need another personality test, or another assessment.
Maybe you don’t need someone else to tell you what you’re good at.
Maybe you need to pay attention to what keeps showing up.
What do people consistently bring to you?
What kind of problem makes you want to pull up a chair instead of running away?
What have you been doing so long that you stopped considering the possibility that it might actually matter?
What comes alive in you when you do it?
…and maybe even harder:
What would you build, create, solve, write, teach, organize, lead or offer if you stopped worrying whether it was important enough to count as a calling?
I’m asking myself those questions now, and I’m realizing my problem was never that I didn’t have any clues. I’ve had decades of them. I just didn’t know what to do with them.
Maybe the harder question was never "What's my gift?"
Maybe it's "Do I trust God enough to use the one He's already given me, and am I willing to do something with it?"
…and perhaps there’s another question underneath even that one: What am I willing to do with it?
Because recognizing the gift is one thing, stewarding it requires something else.
It requires movement. It requires the willingness to try something before I know exactly where it will lead. It requires letting go of the belief that I need the entire plan before I take the next step.
It takes courage.
I'm still sitting with that. I still don’t know exactly what all of this becomes.
I don't have a tidy conclusion or a perfectly packaged new business plan…God knows I’d love that, but maybe that’s not what I’m supposed to have just yet. Maybe this season isn’t about figuring out the entire destination. Maybe it’s about finally paying attention to the breadcrumbs.
I’m beginning to suspect I’ve spent years searching for clarity when what I really needed was courage - and if that’s true, maybe it’s time to stop asking God to show me what He’s already shown me, and start asking Him what He wants me to do with it.
I don't know yet what this becomes in practice. I only know I'm not done writing about it.
