When God Says, What If? How Your Purpose Will Impact The World

Chapter 2 - Allow yourself to dream

Since I was young, I always knew I was here for a reason. If my Mother were still alive she would tell you. I spoke to her about it all the time. I would share with her my thoughts and dreams and inspirations. I would get ideas and call and run them by her. She was the best. She would always encourage me, no matter how silly my ideas were. She believed in me deeply and would come along with me for the ride of my dreams. She was an amazing Mother.

We lost her just last year and I still have the last card she ever sent to me hanging on my refrigerator. It isn't a birthday card or holiday card; it is a card to congratulate me on receiving my red belt in Kung Fu; the last stop before the long journey to black. But it isn't the card alone that makes me leave it there, but what she wrote. She wrote that I always set and achieved my goals, that I was amazing. I hope she knew that it was her that was truly amazing.

Searching for my life's purpose almost took on a life of its own. I looked and searched everywhere. I found clues by reading biographies of great people, through buying audio programs and listening over and over again for the lessons of others. I had mistakenly thought that I could find my own path by looking at theirs, but in trying I would always come up short. Was I supposed to do exactly what they had done, try to mimic their path? Was I listening or watching this person at this exact moment because I too was supposed to do what they were doing? Where were the answers and how would I know when I found them?

I looked and looked. In everything I listened to, in everything I read, in every person I met, I continued to search. It's like I was waiting to find one of those big signs on the Highway that said, Melissa Wittke – your destiny 2 miles ahead. Did you ever feel that way? That you were looking for this big kick in the butt to stop you in your tracks and say, "look here you dummy!" You laugh, but I would have preferred it that way, because sometimes our true purpose is calling loudly, and what do we do? We ignore it!

Yes, that is what I did. I cannot tell you how many times God spoke to me over the years. The ironic part is that I would have told you how desperately I was searching, yet I would ignore all the clues God placed directly in my path. Have you ever done that? How did I ignore them? By talking myself out of what was right there in the open for me to see. I did it by declaring loudly how little I believed in myself and in the gifts God had intentionally given me, and that I was trying hard to say weren't enough.

I was like the person staring over the fence at my neighbor's lawn, seeing how green it was. I would watch them planting, fertilizing and mowing, while of course ignoring my own lawn that had potential. All the while declaring how great theirs was and how inferior my own was. Do you know what I am saying? Do you see the equivalent of how we do this today? Social media, in my mind, is the equivalent today. We look at pictures and videos of what is represented as perfect lives that are of course, superior to our own. While there are a ton of lessons here, the one I want to bring to the forefront is the idea that anyone else on this planet is superior to you – because that is not even close to true.

In order to take hold of our destiny, we must understand that our unique purpose that caused our creation is not meant to be a comparison to any other living person. It is a simple truth, yet hard to put into practice. After all, isn't it much easier to think everyone else got a better deal than us? That somehow we were left short? Feeling bad about ourselves seems to come much easier, and feel much more natural, than accepting who we were created to be. Not to mention that people seem to love to chime in about what we can't do in life (we will get to that too).

But the point here is that God's plans are for each of us individually. He didn't run out of ideas and start giving duplicates. Yet that is almost how we act. Instead of taking the time to explore what makes us totally unique, we instead look around at everyone else and try to copy. It is so silly, yet how many of us can say we haven't done it? I know I have started to walk down paths that I clearly should have never been on because it looked good on someone else.