I spent three years on my sofa.

I spent three years on my sofa.

Not physically, but in my heart, it felt like I did.

COVID-related budget cuts eliminated my position at a previous place of employment, and I found myself grappling with the familiar “what now?” conundrum. It wasn’t the first time I had found myself on the wrong side of budget cuts, but this time I wanted “what’s next?” to feel different. I wanted more control over how I used my talents and my time.

So I took inventory. I researched opportunities and considered building my own business in e-commerce. I learned the steps, spent countless hours reading and learning from others online, immersed myself in the e-commerce world, and breathed in every version of the “don’t stop” mantra I could find.

As a perpetual student, I was excited to learn new skills. I especially loved that my concept centered on creating joy and on the belief that “people will remember how you made them feel.” I was learning and growing, and I could see the purpose in much of it. Yet, somehow, I still felt adrift.

Three years.

Three years of feeling like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Three years of wearing someone else’s clothes and pounding on a door that simply would not open.
This week, my sister shared a post with a line that took me right back to those years and the emotions they carried:
“Trust that God knows what you need, when you need it, and how it will shape your destiny.”

Since June 2023, I have been coming to a place of work that absolutely I love, surrounded by people I feel incredibly blessed to work with and learn from. Looking back, I can see that every place I have worked, including those three years when I felt so lost, was shaping me. Each experience taught me something, sharpened a skill, or prepared me for the role in which I now feel so deeply fulfilled.

I often ask myself, and encourage my sons to ask themselves after a disappointment: What was the lesson?

Because disappointment does not have to be the end of the story. It can be a classroom.

To see disappointment as anything other than an opportunity to learn can leave us looking backward with regret. But I know with a certainty as firm as my confidence that the sun will rise that God is always at work, shaping us and working through us. Even in the seasons when we cannot see where He is leading.

I am here to serve Him by serving others.

And sometimes the door that refuses to open is simply God’s way of leading us toward the one He has already prepared for us.

“The human heart plans the way, but the LORD directs the steps.”
 Proverbs 16:9