On Purpose

Boy let me tell you, inspiration is an interesting thing. It can come out of nowhere and have you a full mess in the middle of a Netflix comedy.

I have been out of work with COVID since Monday, starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There have been a lot of people less fortunate who have lost this same battle that has been an inconvenience for me. I feel for those people but my faith allows me to believe greater things await them.

With that being said while running a fever and not feeling like even getting out of bed entertainment streaming services have become a friend of mine. I have caught up on a lot of shows and watched some movies I didn’t know existed. I watched a movie today that had me in my feelings nearly from the opening credits.

It’s because it was a topic I could relate to. It was a movie about an overweight girl who didn’t fit society’s idea of beauty joining a pageant. Ok now that I’ve typed that out I think I may need to explain a little, maybe give a little context.

While all of you know I’m not a girl and I’m not entering a pageant, I am overweight, more than a hundred pounds if you ask my doctor, and I am not society’s idea of beauty. This movie centers around the struggle to be yourself, and to be accepted in a world you don’t necessarily “fit in.”

That is something that has been on my list of struggles for nearly as long as I can remember. I have been made to feel too fat, unattractive, unintelligent, and many times undesirable by people who I placed on pedestals and gave them power over who I “thought” I was. I gave people the power to destroy my self confidence by putting so much stock in their opinions discounting my own.

This movie has a ton of references to Dolly Parton who I love. In this movie they quote Dolly as saying “find out who you are, and do it on purpose.” The quote isn’t to find out who they think you are, it is about who you find when you’re looking in the mirror. That one soul that will be with you through thick and thin, from the cradle to the grave.

Why do we place so little stock in the opinion of ourselves? I know I’m hard on myself because I know all of the terrible things I’ve ever done, said, or thought. You know what else I know, every time I have ever helped someone who couldn’t repay me, every time I’ve ever done for someone when no one saw, everything that I have ever done while asking myself what I would do if that was Jesus that needed help.

So today I’m going to beg each of you to follow Dolly’s lead, to find out who you are, who you want to be, and to live that life on purpose.

I love you.