Follow Your Inner Compass

31 May Follow Your Inner Compass

Have you ever felt the urge to take on something new? To run a half marathon? To start a new business? To move to a new community? Or even change the world? Have you ever felt like you were made for more?

Maybe you’re happy with where you are in life. You have great friends, a good job, and everything you could possibly want. You’re comfortable. There may be a few things out of sorts, but overall you feel good about where you’re at.

This was me 4 years ago! We were living in DeWitt and loving our life there. I was proud of how far we had come, the challenges we had overcome, the friends we had made, experiences we were fortunate enough to partake in, and our wonderful career paths. We were living the life.

So you can imagine when my husband told me he had been recruited by a vet clinic in western Iowa, I was devastated. I felt like we would have to give up all that we had worked so hard to achieve and start new, once again…making new friends, starting new jobs, and getting involved in a new community.

Even though I LOVED western Iowa and even the Manning community (which I had experienced 5 years earlier) I was still hesitant to believe that this was the right move for our family. So I prayed about it and prayed about it.

Although a small part of me remembered that my lifelong dream was to be an entrepreneur having a business in rural Iowa that took advantage of all my varied talents and impacted Iowa, I still couldn’t quite understand why that meant I would have to move and start over in a new community. I thought we had found our landing place, and I would have loved to start that same business in DeWitt.

But on a beautiful sunny day in June 2016 (June 2nd, our anniversary to be exact) God slapped me upside the face with more signs than I could possibly resist. It was a pivotal moment in my life and from that day forward I never looked back and never questioned the path that I was on was one led by God’s love, hope and grace.

As I sit here on an incredible family vacation to South Dakota (nearly 3 years to the day after that transformational moment) I can’t help but be overwhelmed by the way God has taken care of us and led us to places we never thought possible.

I knew where I wanted to be in life ‘someday’ and what goals I had set before me to be able to get there. I’m a planner and I know that you have to have a vision, put in the time, gain the experience, and work hard to achieve your dreams. But what I had forgotten was that God also has a plan, and it’s ALWAYS greater than you could ever imagine or ‘plan!’

It took that turtle coming right up into our backyard to remind me that we must follow our inner vision, adapt to new surroundings, trust that all things happen in perfect and divine timing and most of all enjoy the journey.

So if you’re on a path that you love (or hate) trust that God has a plan for you as well. Prepare to emerge strengthened. Your journey has only just begun.