Only God can lead you to your Purpose in Life, and I found God in 3 major ways:
1) First, I became so unhappy and unfulfilled with my life, that I was desperate for change. My life had become a unmanageable state of misery. A good friend of mine had just died of a drug overdose, and I had been living a lie most of my life. I suddenly realized all of the achievements in my life didn’t mean a thing as I hadn’t worked hard for any of them. I had spent my whole life coasting by on natural talent, trying to act the role I thought everyone else wanted me to be, that I lost who I really was. I felt so ugly, and unfulfilled, and I was desperate for a change. I was finally ready to open the door, and when I did, God showed up and entered my life.
2) In the next few weeks, I was introduced to a new a group of people who I immediately saw were doing awesome things with their life. They were authentic, and working hard for their dreams. I was so sick of my own life at the time, that I was willing to try anything. I asked them what made their lives seem so fulfilled and interesting, and they told me that once they began seeking God, everything began to stabilize and make sense once they committed to the journey to find him.
3) This group became my new friends, and I began to feel a spirit nudging me in new directions. I was told that these “nudgings” were called convictions of the spirit, and if I really wanted a new life and adventure, I had to discipline myself to follow these convictions.
Once I began to follow these spiritual convictions, my character changed almost overnight. I saw new opportunities and possibilities for my path, and I began to form a new identity based on listening to God, and disciplining myself to be emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I started seeing myself as a warrior with a purpose in life, not as a fraud, and this new psyche changed everything about me from the inside out.
How I followed my first conviction, as this is really where my journey to find God began:
I was in jail when I experienced my first conviction 13 years ago. I remember it as the first major turning point that greatly changed my life and sent me down the healthy path I am on now. I can remember it so clearly:
I was sitting on the top of a bunk bed. I had just gotten done reading some really intelligent books that I could feel actually expanding my mind. I was on a mission to grow and learn, and new thoughts and ideas were exploding in my mind. I was growing from the fraud I was, into a man I was excited to be. It was the first time in years I felt truly proud of myself for making the right decisions to fix my life, and I felt like I had the chance to become somebody special if I could finally commit to this way of life. My mind and body were becoming healthier, and I was feeling unstoppable. I was riding one of the best highs I had ever felt. It was better than any drug I’d felt before this.
I decided to take a 15 minute break, and when I got down off my bunk, I noticed one of those stupid, colorful gossip-magazines. It was a national enquirer with a beautiful, airbrushed woman on the cover. The colors and pictures were alluring to me – it looked like such easy, mindless entertainment, an easy escape from the hard work I was putting in – and so I picked it up and began to scroll through it. Thirty minutes passed, and I suddenly felt a change happening inside my expanding mind. My mind suddenly stopped growing, and I felt like I was becoming dumber looking at this magazine.
I could actually feel all the intelligent information that I had worked so hard for actually leave my brain, to make room for all of this mindless garbage to enter. I could actually feel my brain shrinking cerebral cortex soaked in all these alluring pictures, and gossip stories, of people I’d never meet and who would never even make an impact my life. I had chosen a momentary path of stupidity over self-discovery.
I was aware for the first time in my life that what we invest our minds in, is who we become! I suddenly had the choice: Did I want my life to look like those intelligent, inspiring books I was reading? Or did I want it to look like a trashy gossip magazine? My choices moving forward were so clear now.
For some, this example could seem so trivial, but for me, it was a landmark moment as I was discovering who I was, and who I wanted to become. That dumb gossip magazine made me realize that I was at a fork in the road, and I had a life-changing choice to make: I had to ask myself, what type of knowledge do I value? What were the choices I was going to make moving forward, because I realized, even these tiny decisions such as what I read, made a difference in my life!
In that moment, I believe I found my true relationship with God, and we traveled a little deeper together. I discovered that to find myself, and to build the character I needed, to reach the dreams I wanted, I had to be mindful of everything.
Every decision, and every influence mattered! Everything I accepted into my life, was going to be the tools I was going to use to build my life.
Like it or not, if you want to maximize your success you should be aware that everything you partake in will affect you in some way. If you want to find God and your purpose in life, maximize your intelligent intake, and abandon all of the idiocy that you can.
That magazine made me feel dumb and empty, and I realized I didn’t have any time or room in my mind for useless knowledge, so I made the decision to throw it out of my life. I credit that moment as the beginning of finding God, and the result was, it was the first moment where I began finding me.
