You Were Born For a Purpose. Now What?
A note before you start. This essay is longer than my usual essays because it's answering a question I've been getting. If you've been reading along and feeling stuck, this essay is for you. And if you're brand new to BFAP and just found me, even better. This is the on-ramp. So give it five to ten minutes of your time. It's worth it.
If you've read more than one or two pieces of my writing, you might be tracking with what I'm saying. Maybe even nodding along. Or feeling the conviction of recognizing yourself in some of the patterns I describe. The drift, the procrastination, the doubt, the unexamined habitual impulses, or the mundane parts of life you've been treating as a non-meaningful part.
And somewhere underneath that recognition, you might be asking yourself:
So what am I actually supposed to do with this?
If that's where you are right now, you're in good company. I get asked some version of this question almost every time someone tells me they've been reading along. I've asked it of myself as I’m writing. Friends and family have asked it. My wife has named it directly. The most common reaction I get from thoughtful, engaged friends and readers isn't disagreement. It's confusion about what the reader is supposed to do with it.
That confusion isn't a bug. On some level, it's actually what I expected, because the reality is that many of us have a hard time looking at our life honestly and sitting with the reality of what it says because of the hurried pace of our lives and the broader culture.
But I don’t want to leave you stuck in the gap of awareness and doing, so this essay is going to step outside the frame of the regular weekly On Purpose essay and talk directly to you about why BFAP exists, how it came to be, and what I'm encouraging you to do with it.
The Why
A core conviction underneath almost everything I write is this:
We are all born for a purpose. But some of us aren’t living like it.
That's not a marketing line. The reason I believe we are all born for a purpose isn't because I read it in a book or just felt it one day. It's because I’ve observed it in the life of my Lord and Savior Jesus. He embodied purpose in everything He said and did, and I believe that He wants us to steward this gift of life in the same way. BFAP is grounded in the fact that the Creator of the universe created us to live lives of purpose. And while you may not agree with my theology or my religious beliefs, I can’t ignore the conclusion that I can't unsee from looking at my own life, watching the people around me, and reading widely across philosophy, theology, and practical formation.
What I’m realizing more and more every day as I observe my own life and the lives of those around me is that individuals struggling with meaning and purpose are distracted, drifting, and on autopilot. Living lives that look fine on the outside while quietly feeling that something is off underneath. Working hard in some areas while ignoring others. Spending time, attention, and money and not even thinking about the why. Pursuing goals without ever asking what the goals are actually for.
BFAP exists because I believe there is an opportunity for each of us to live more purposeful and meaningful lives, and it starts with paying attention.
Paying attention to how we spend our time, and what that is actually saying about what you and I value.
Paying attention to the good (and bad) patterns you and I are ignoring.
Paying attention to the questions you and I have been afraid to ask or the answers to questions that we’re afraid to admit.
Your life is already speaking. The question is whether you're paying attention and listening well enough to respond.
The Formation
Now that I’ve told you about the why of BFAP, I want to tell you how BFAP came to be….
I bought the domain for bornforapurpose.com in 2012, when I was 30.
I didn't launch it until 2025, when I was 43.
Thirteen years sat between the idea and the action.
Thirteen years where I had the URL, the name, even a rough sense of what I wanted to build, and I did nothing with it. Not because I was lazy, because I forgot about it, or because I didn't think it mattered. It was because deep down I wasn't ready.
I spent those thirteen years (plus the 30 before that) living the very thoughts and questions I’m now writing about.
Drifting in some seasons and being ruthlessly intentional in others.
Trying to fix one pillar of my life while ignoring others.
Pursuing career milestones only to discover that they didn't deliver the meaning I expected.
Building habits, breaking them, rebuilding them.
Walking with people through their own seasons of confusion and clarity.
Reading hundreds of books.
Failing at some things, and succeeding at other things and realizing that I could learn from either.
I needed that time for formation. I just didn't know it.
What I thought was delay was actually formation. The version of me who would have launched BFAP in 2012 wouldn’t have the same things to say then that I do now. He had a brand idea and a domain name, but he didn't have a body of lived experience to draw from. He hadn't sat in enough hard conversations. He hadn't failed at enough things. He hadn't watched enough people make the same mistakes he was making.
When I finally launched in 2025, I wasn't launching a brand. I was launching the result of 13 (plus 30) years of attention.
I tell you this because the same principle applies to you. Whatever you're sitting with right now, whatever you're feeling pulled toward but haven't acted on, whatever season of your life feels like it's just dragging on without producing anything visible, you might not be wasting time. You might be in formation. Sometimes the most intentional thing you can do in the waiting is to keep paying attention, because you never know when you’ll wake up one day with radical clarity.
The Pillars
Before I tell you what the practice looks like, I need to give you an overview of the BFAP pillars.
When I talk about paying attention to your life, I don’t mean paying attention in some vague, abstract sense. I mean paying attention to seven specific areas where almost all of our lives are actually being lived: career, relationships, spiritual habits, fitness, diet, finances, and hobbies and rest.
These seven pillars aren’t a system I invented, and they’re not necessarily an exhaustive list of everything in your life. But they are a description of how our lives are actually structured, and most everything you do in a given day (even the mundane parts of life I wrote about last week) fits inside one of them.
Your work
The people you spend time with
What grounds you internally
How you care for your body
What you eat
How you handle money
Your hobbies and fun
I want to be intentionally direct about one of these pillars because my framework isn’t neutral, and I won’t pretend that it is. Spiritual habits is not just another pillar among equals. For me, this is the foundation underneath everything BFAP is built on, and the other six pillars depend on it. For you, this foundation may look different right now, and that’s okay. But every life requires some kind of foundation, and for me, that is Jesus and His way.
The other pillars don’t need a lot of explanation here. You already have an understanding (on some level) of the importance of a career. You already know who your closest relationships are. You already know whether you’re exercising, eating with intention, handling money well, and using your free time in ways that restore you or drain you. If you want a more detailed look at how I think about any of them, the BFAP Pillars page lays it out, along with several other essays that I’ve written.
What I want you to do right now is hold the seven pillars as a frame, not as a specific to-do list, because while they’re the categories of your life, the practice is what you do within each one.
The Practice
Now we’ve gotten to the part of the essay that answers the actual question.
If you've been reading along and wondering what to do, here it is. The five parts below are not a checklist, but an evergreen posture of intentional living that you carry and repeat across every area of your life throughout your life.
Pay attention. I say it over and over again in my writing: Your Life is Speaking…Are You Listening? You need to get good at paying attention. Not abstractly. Specifically. To where your time goes. To what your spending reveals. To the conversations you avoid. To the moments you feel drained versus the ones that fill you up. To the patterns that keep showing up across months and years. To the gap between your values and your actual behavior. Many people go years (or decades) without ever paying attention to their own lives in any meaningful way. They react. They respond. They consume. But they don't observe. So start paying attention.
Ask why. Why is a powerful question because it makes you think. The more you ask it, the more you’ll naturally pay attention. The two practices reinforce each other. Ask yourself questions like this: Why am I doing this? Why does this feel off? Why do I keep coming back to the same problem? Why am I so concerned about what others think? The discipline of asking why is the antidote to running on autopilot, but it’s also the most uncomfortable discipline you'll develop, because once you start asking, you can't unsee the answers. Oh and another thing, if someone else is trying to tell you your why, question it. Because if you just adopt their why then you’ll still be stuck trying to find yours.
Notice patterns. Single moments don't tell you much, but patterns tell you a lot. The same friction in the same pillar across years means something. The lack of energy in an area of your life. The relationships that keep working versus the ones that keep creating problems. The habits you keep returning to and the ones you keep abandoning. Patterns are how your life speaks. Pay attention to them, ask why about them, and learn to read them.
Take ownership of the inputs. You can’t necessarily control outcomes, but you can control your inputs. You may not be able to control whether your career takes off, whether your investments or money in your bank will grow at the pace you want them to, or whether people in your life will treat you nicely. But you can control whether you show up, whether you put in the work, whether you keep your commitments, and what attitude you have when things don’t go the way you want. The shift from trying to control outcomes to faithfully managing inputs is one of the most freeing moves in adult life. Notice patterns in your life where you’re not managing the inputs well, ask why, and continue to pay attention to it as you steward the new inputs.
Use tools when you need help. I've built specific resources for the moments when they fit. The 5-Minute Reality Check is for the person who needs to start. The Self-Reflection Guide is for the person who's ready to go deeper. The weekly essays and the Bearing Check newsletter are for ongoing reflection and recalibration. If coaching makes sense for your season, that's available too. More resources will come over time. None of these are assignments. They're help for specific moments. Use the one that matches where you are.
That's it. That's the practice.
It's not a 30-day challenge, and it’s not a system you complete. The practice I outlined is a way of carrying yourself through your own life with more awareness, more honesty, and more intention than the cultural default produces.
And if you're wondering whether five movements done imperfectly over years can actually produce a different life, I can tell you from my own experience that the answer is yes. Slowly and quietly, and not all at once, but unmistakably yes.
The Invitation
So here's what I want to leave you with.
You were Born For a Purpose. That's not just a slogan. That's a conviction I hold deeply enough to keep building an entire body of work around it. And the purpose you're looking for is not somewhere out there waiting to be discovered. It's not in a productivity system, a morning routine, or a self-help book (although each of those can be tremendously helpful). It's in your actual life, already revealing itself through your choices, your time, your habits, and your priorities.
The question is whether you're willing to pay attention, ask why, notice the patterns, own the inputs, and use help when you need it.
If you've been reading along and feeling stuck, the stuck-ness is not a sign that something is wrong with you or with what you're reading. It's a sign that you've started to absorb the diagnosis, and you're now standing at the threshold of the practice. That's actually progress. Lots of people never get this far because they consume content that should change them and then move on to the next thing without changing.
Don't be that person.
Start where you are. Pick one pillar of your life. The one that's been bothering you. The one you've been avoiding. The one you know needs attention. Pay attention to it. Ask why. Notice the patterns. Take ownership of the inputs. Use the resources when you need them.
Then do it again next week. And next month. And next year.
This is not a sprint. It's not even a marathon. It's a way of life. And the people who build genuinely meaningful lives are not the people who had one breakthrough moment. They're the people who carried this posture for decades, mostly invisibly, and let the practice work on them over time.
You can be one of those people.
But it requires you to stop waiting for someone to give you the answer, and start doing the work of paying honest attention to the life you already have.
Your life is already speaking.
The question is whether you're finally ready to listen.
