Originally published in 2018. Completely revised and expanded for our lives in 2026–Because we all are growing and changing, and Built To Be A Butterfly is, too! 🙂
Have you ever spent time with a group of first graders and asked them that age-old question:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
If you haven’t, you should try it sometime.
It is a glorious way to spend a few hours.
The answers come flying out of those little mouths with absolutely no concern for whether their dreams are practical, profitable, impressive, or even remotely possible.
Astronaut.
Veterinarian.
Teacher.
Professional athlete.
Artist.
Marine biologist.
Somebody inevitably wants to be a princess.
And why not?
At that age, the possibilities still feel wide open.
They haven’t learned yet to measure their dreams against their failures. They haven’t accumulated years of other people’s opinions about what they’re capable of. They haven’t built a mental Rolodex of every reason something might not work.
They simply imagine a future—and believe they might have something to do with creating it.
But here’s what has always struck me about that question.
I’ve never had a child look at me and say,
“When I grow up, I want to be miserable.”
Nobody says they want to spend their adult years buried under resentment, fear, exhaustion, loneliness, regret, or the constant feeling that they’re living somebody else’s life.
Nobody dreams of waking up one morning and realizing,
“How in the world did I get here?”
And yet…
For some of us, that’s exactly what happens.
Not because we woke up one morning and deliberately chose a life we didn’t recognize.
For most of us, it didn’t happen in one solitary choice.
The process happens slowly.
Here a little. There a little.
One compromise.
One fear-based decision.
One relationship we knew wasn’t healthy.
One dream we talked ourselves out of.
One opportunity we were too afraid to pursue.
One more time saying yes when everything inside us wanted to say no.
One more year spent surviving instead of becoming.
Until one day, we wake up and don’t recognize the life we’ve built.
We’ve talked about this before.
Our choices become patterns.
Our patterns create precedents.
And eventually, those precedents can become the life we’re living.
But that realization raises another question.
A really important one.
If our choices are helping create the life we’re living… what are we intentionally creating?
Because here’s the thing:
You don’t accidentally build a purposeful life.
You build it through the things you repeatedly choose to give your time, attention, courage, energy, and love to.
And that doesn’t mean you need a five-year plan.
It doesn’t mean you need to quit your job, sell your house, move across the country, and reinvent yourself before breakfast.
It means you occasionally need to stop long enough to look at your life and ask:
Is the life I’m building actually the life I want to be building?
That’s a question worth sitting with.
So let’s sit with it.
1. Admit when you’ve gotten off course.
You can’t change what you refuse to see.
Sometimes the first step toward a purposeful life is simply admitting:
“This isn’t where I want to be.”
Not because your entire life is terrible.
Not because you’ve failed at everything.
Maybe you’re simply tired of drifting.
Maybe you’ve spent so much time responding to whatever was screaming the loudest that you’ve forgotten to ask what actually matters to you.
Maybe you’ve spent years being everything everybody else needed and somewhere along the way, you stopped listening for God’s direction in your own life.
Whatever the reason, you don’t have to defend it.
You don’t have to produce a ten-page explanation for how you got here.
Just tell yourself the truth.
I’m off course.
That’s not the end of the story.
It’s the moment you finally know where you are.
And you can’t redirect a life until you’re willing to admit its current direction.
2. Decide what actually matters.
This sounds simple.
It isn’t.
Because we’re surrounded by an astonishing amount of noise telling us what should matter.
Be successful.
Be productive.
Have more.
Do more.
Look younger.
Stay relevant.
Make everybody happy.
Keep up.
Don’t disappoint anyone.
And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, we can lose track of a very important question:
What actually matters to me?
More importantly:
What matters to God?
What kind of woman do you want to become?
What do you want your life to stand for?
Who do you want to love well?
What gifts have you been given?
What keeps tugging at your heart?
What would you regret never attempting?
You don’t have to have all the answers.
But you do need to start asking better questions.
Because if you don’t decide what matters, something—or someone—will decide for you.
3. Pay attention to what gets your life energy.
Here’s where things get uncomfortable.
We all say certain things are important.
But our calendars, our bank accounts, our attention, and our energy often tell a slightly different story.
And I’m not suggesting you need to turn your life into a spreadsheet.
I’m asking you to pay attention.
What gets the best of you?
What gets your leftover energy?
What occupies your thoughts?
What do you make time for?
What do you consistently say yes to?
What do you consistently put off?
Because your time is voting for something whether you realize it or not.
So look at your actual life—not the one you intended to have.
What is getting your life?
And is that what you want to be giving it to?
4. Remember that your value comes before your accomplishments.
This one matters.
Because purpose can get twisted into performance awfully fast.
We start thinking:
If I accomplish enough, I’ll matter.
If I become successful enough, I’ll have value.
If I finally do something important, then my life will mean something.
No.
Your value isn’t something you earn by performing well enough.
You were fearfully and wonderfully made before you accomplished a single thing.
Your worth isn’t waiting at the finish line.
It’s already there.
And that changes the way we approach purpose.
We’re not scrambling to prove that our lives matter.
We’re learning how to faithfully use the life we’ve been given.
There is a difference.
A big one.
5. Start.
Eventually, thinking about it isn’t enough.
You’ve got to move.
Start before you’re ready.
You don’t need confidence.
You don’t need a five-year plan.
You don’t need to know exactly how this turns out.
You need a next step.
Maybe it’s a phone call.
Maybe it’s a class.
Maybe it’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding.
Maybe it’s pulling an old dream out of the drawer and looking at it again.
Maybe it’s finally admitting that something needs to change.
Maybe it’s ten minutes spent doing something you’ve been putting off for ten years.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic.
It just has to be movement.
Because purpose isn’t discovered entirely through thinking.
Sometimes you discover it by moving.
6. Do it scared.
I wish I could tell you that once you figure out what matters, the fear disappears.
It doesn’t.
Sorry.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Fear will show up.
It will have questions.
It will have scenarios.
It will remind you of every time you failed before.
It will point out everything that could possibly go wrong.
And sometimes it will make a very convincing argument.
Listen to it if you need to.
Then don’t necessarily obey it.
Courage isn’t the absence of fear.
Sometimes courage is simply deciding that fear doesn’t get to make the final decision.
You can be afraid and still take the step.
You can be uncertain and still begin.
You can be terrified and still show up.
Have fear—and do it anyway. (And yes– It CAN be done. I’m doing it every time I push “publish” on this blog!)
7. Let “good enough” be good enough sometimes.
Perfection has stolen enough already.
I used to live by the rule:
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
Age and experience have taught me something different.
Sometimes:
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing—even if I get it wrong.
Because here’s what perfectionism does.
It convinces us that waiting is wisdom.
It tells us we’re not ready.
Not qualified.
Not polished enough.
Not knowledgeable enough.
Not certain enough.
So we wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Meanwhile, somebody with half our experience and twice our willingness to look foolish has already started.
Trying and getting it wrong is still movement.
It teaches you something.
It gives you information.
It builds courage.
It gets you five steps farther than standing still waiting for perfection to arrive.
And besides…
Perfection is a terrible traveling companion.
She makes you late for everything! Including the discovery of your best life!
8. Let your past teach you.
This one may be especially important if you’ve spent any time recently looking honestly at the choices you’ve made.
Look at your past as a teacher, not your taskmaster.
Don’t deny it.
Don’t romanticize it.
Don’t pretend it didn’t hurt.
And don’t let it become the place where you live forever.
Learn from it.
Even the things that were completely outside your control can teach you something.
Pain can deepen compassion.
Loss can change your priorities.
Failure can expose what wasn’t working.
And sometimes, if we’re being really honest, we have to look at something we did and say:
“Yep. I screwed that up.”
That’s painful.
But you don’t have to waste a mistake.
You can learn from it.
You can make amends where necessary.
You can change your behavior.
You can choose differently.
You can mark that particular road on your map:
Been there.
Learned that.
Don’t need to go back.
You paid for that experience with blood, sweat, tears, time, or all four.
Don’t waste what it taught you.
We just spent time looking honestly at the choices that helped create the life we’re living.
Now comes the equally important part:
Don’t use what you discover to beat yourself up.
Use it to become wiser.
9. Make room to become.
Growth doesn’t happen very well in a life with no room for it.
And I’m not talking about adding another obligation to your already ridiculous to-do list.
I’m talking about creating some space where you can actually pay attention to your own becoming.
Read something that challenges you.
Study Scripture.
Journal.
Take a walk without your phone screaming at you.
Learn something you’ve always been curious about.
Listen to someone wiser than you.
Ask God some honest questions.
Get counsel when you need it.
Create something.
Sit quietly long enough to hear your own thoughts.
Try something you’ve never tried before.
Feed your mind.
Feed your spirit.
Feed your curiosity.
Make room to become.
Because you cannot keep pouring from a soul that is never allowed to be replenished.
And sometimes growth isn’t about doing more.
Sometimes it’s about finally making room for something deeper.
10. Practice gratitude without pretending life is easy.
Let’s be honest.
Sometimes gratitude feels ridiculous.
It’s hard to be grateful when you’re standing in the dumpster of life.
I know.
But gratitude isn’t pretending the dumpster doesn’t stink.
It’s refusing to believe the dumpster is the entire landscape.
There can be rain and flowers.
There can be grief and goodness.
There can be disappointment and hope.
There can be a terrible season and evidence of God’s faithfulness right in the middle of it.
Gratitude is a muscle.
We strengthen it by using it.
Not because everything is good.
But because everything isn’t only bad.
So look again.
What is still here?
Who is still here?
What did you survive?
What did you learn?
What are you capable of now that you weren’t capable of before?
What small beautiful thing showed up today?
Don’t let what’s hard become the only thing you can see.
So… where are we going?
Remember last week’s conversation?
We talked about the wagon.
Those horses pulling it.
People Pleasing.
Fear of Rejection.
Avoiding Conflict.
I Don’t Want to Be Alone.
Everybody Else’s Needs Come First.
I’ll Deal With It Later.
And that particularly stubborn one:
But They Did It First.
We talked about what happens when we keep feeding those horses and then wonder why the wagon keeps ending up in the same places.
And we ended with this:
Grab the reins.
But there’s another question waiting for us once we realize we have some say in the direction of our lives.
Where are we going?
Not where everybody else thinks we should go.
Not where fear says we have to stay.
Not where our past tells us we’re destined to end up.
Where are we actually trying to go?
Because grabbing the reins isn’t the destination.
It’s the beginning of intentional living.
And maybe you don’t know exactly where you’re headed yet.
That’s okay.
You don’t have to.
You just need to stop drifting long enough to choose the next road.
You don’t have to waste your life.
I don’t mean that harshly.
I mean it as an invitation.
You have been given a life.
Not a perfect life.
Not a painless life.
Not a life where every circumstance will cooperate with your plans.
We’ve talked about that too.
Sometimes life hands you lemons.
Sometimes somebody else hands them to you.
Sometimes you trip over the stupid things yourself.
Sometimes the storm comes whether you were ready or not.
You don’t get to choose every circumstance.
But you do have a say in what you do with the life that remains in your hands.
That’s where purpose comes in.
Purpose isn’t necessarily some enormous, earth-shattering assignment that arrives with trumpets and a spotlight.
Sometimes purpose looks remarkably ordinary.
It’s showing up.
It’s loving people well.
It’s using the gifts you’ve been given.
It’s doing the work that’s yours to do.
It’s caring when it would be easier not to.
It’s having the courage to try again.
It’s learning from your mistakes instead of building a home inside them.
It’s becoming more of the woman God created you to be.
And maybe, when all is said and done, that’s what I want most.
I want to be able to look back and know that I showed up.
That I cared.
That I used what I’d been given.
That I didn’t allow fear to make every decision for me.
That I didn’t spend my whole life waiting until I felt ready.
That I didn’t waste the experiences I paid for so dearly.
That I kept becoming.
And when the sun finally sets on my life, I hope people can say:
The world is a little better because she was here.
Because she showed up.
Because she was brave enough to keep caring—
even when it hurt like Hades.
So, friend…
What do you want?
Not what does everybody else want from you.
Not what would make you look successful.
Not what would make your life Instagram-worthy.
Not what would keep everybody comfortable.
What do you want your life to be about?
Maybe it’s time to start figuring that out.
Not tomorrow.
Not when life settles down.
Not when you’re finally confident.
Now.
One choice.
Then another.
Then another.
That’s how a purposeful life is built.
Not all at once.
Here a little.
There a little.
One brave step at a time.
Because God isn’t finished with you yet.
And there is still more to your story.
Until Next Time—Keep showing up!
