Driven By Design

By Jonathan Everett

Excuse the interruption! This book takes the bold step of interrupting the patterns of our lives. A corrective vision tool, DRIVEN BY DESIGN, propels

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabez Publishing House
• Release date: Dec 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736915592

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

PURPOSE

Unhealed hurts, unresolved issues, and unmet needs are the cornerstone of unfulfillment.

The only fulfillment you’ll ever experience in life is when you are doing what you were born to do and operating in your gift.

One way we can learn to live on a budget is by being slow to speak and quick to listen.

GROUNDED IN TIME

Did you know that the end is always determined at the beginning? That’s right! Everything you will ever do has already been finished. If you’re looking to build a house, the first thing you need to do is identify the finished work. What kind of home do you want? If you’re looking to start a garden, you have to determine what kind of vegetables you want to grow. Using these two examples, let us take a deeper dive. The garden will require you to look at a piece of land and see the finished work before you start. When you go to the farmers market, you don’t buy tomatoes and carrots to bring back to stick in the ground. Instead, you buy a bag of seeds with a picture of the finished work you want to see on the outside of the bag. When you return to your land, you cultivate it and prepare it to receive the seed. After planting the seed, you start the clock to estimate the time it will take to produce. Just as it is true that you cannot see or know how the bones grow in a mother’s womb, so it is with Mother Nature. As the earth is processing your seed, it may not look to you as if anything is happening but the roots being firmly established in the dark are critical for its fruitfulness.

So, you must be confident in knowing that the time you are investing in the garden’s growth is working for you and not against you. If the house doesn’t come to fruition and the garden doesn’t produce within the estimated time, then we can conclude that our time was spent and not invested. Only when our time is invested can we expect or demand a return on the promise. Contrary to what you may think – a promise cannot be broken. A promise is the activation of a law which is defined as the predictable consequence of an act. It is against the law of the earth for a seed planted in the right season and at the right time not to produce. If the ground miscarried your seed, then it was not firmly planted or invested in the right place at the right time. The ground knows what to do – the question is – do you know what to do with the ground?

Promise and purpose are synonymous. In fact, they are so interchangeable that we can’t look at one without the other. Seeking purpose and fulfillment has always been a daunting task for many. The most essential thing that anyone seeking purpose and absolute fulfillment must achieve is the ability to navigate through perception of broken promises and alternative perspectives. Our promise is in our purpose and our purpose is in our promise. When we misunderstand or try to separate the two, we open ourselves up to an unfulfilled life. Also, when we enter covenants with people, places, things, and ideas that do not align with our purpose, brokenness is inevitable. It may be hard to hear this, but I have to say that broken promises are not possible when we’re living our purpose. If the promises of others are the measuring stick for our success, then we are destined to fail. Promise and purpose are as lawful as gravity is to the earth. Gravity doesn’t decide to take the day off or change its mind and cease to exist. It doesn’t agree to work today and not tomorrow for if it did then it would not be a promise at all. Gravity promises to operate in its original intent and purpose. Imagine if gravity decided it didn’t know what its purpose was and then blew like the wind because it wanted to experiment to see what would happen if it decided to be something other than its intended purpose? We’d all be in a world of trouble. Could it be that the world is in trouble today because it is full of people who are chasing their purpose like they are chasing after the wind? Maybe if we came in agreement with our purpose and stood in our rightful place we wouldn’t have to look around and ask where God is or where God was at different points of our lives and know that He was with us all along.

Unhealed hurts, unresolved issues, and unmet needs are the cornerstone of unfulfillment. Unless and until these areas are resolved, it is difficult for us to move forward. Oftentimes, we unknowingly allow unfulfillment to lead us to places we never thought we’d go and keep us there far longer than we intended to stay. For some of us, we look to people, places, things, and ideas we hope will give us the information we need to move on in our purpose when our purpose was living inside of us all along. We blame people for our shortcomings or for the reason we have not lived a fulfilled life. Instead of owning our role in our pain, we turn to others and cast blame externally. Instead of using our problems as opportunities, we build monuments there. If we understood our purpose, our purpose would help us move forward. But instead, we just move on, moving on still not knowing who we are or how to make that situation work for us and not against us.

I’ve learned that moving on doesn’t always mean moving forward. There are those of us who have been stuck in the trauma of a bad experience and while our body has moved on in age, we are frozen in time. There are those of us who have the appearance of a fulfilled life, according to our age, when in reality, we may be a 14-year-old boy stuck in a 35-year-old body. Trauma and disappointment can lead to a place of brokenness that time cannot heal. Time is not a healing agent so I’m sorry to cancel the idea that time will heal you. Only your purpose can heal you. The only fulfillment you’ll ever experience in life is when you are doing what you were born to do and operating in your gift. When you’re operating in your gifts, you learn how to invest time but outside of your gift is when you splurge and spend then hold everyone and everything around you accountable when you don’t see a return in your account.

TAKING OUR TIME

God made time like he made everything else. It is a resource tool for us to measure days, set appointments, determine seasons, and organize our lives. Time doesn’t do anything to us, but it does everything for us. By this, I mean we must be intentional about how we use our time. If not used properly,