I’m going to come clean right away. This is not a step-by-step guide to discovering God’s plan for your life, finding your soul mate, tapping into your potential, or unlocking the secrets to your career success. I can’t even tell you what that is for my life, so I’m not going to pretend to do it for yours.

For a long time, most of my life, I read a lot of Christian how-to books. Some of them were great, others were ridiculous. A lot of them said that if you do A plus B and get rid of C in your life, then voila! you could discover God’s plan for your life (who you should marry, what career you should go into, etc). But I did A plus B, tried to get rid of C and I ended up pregnant instead of the writer I thought I was supposed to be.

Say whaaat?

I was very busy reading all these books, very concerned with doing the “right thing” with my life, and, quite frankly, very self-absorbed. I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing something “big” with my life, something that “mattered.” I wasn’t making an impact, didn’t have success, felt like my life was pretty little. Most of the time, I felt like a failure.

I believed that if I can just discover what God made me to be, then I would feel relief, find success, and step into a peaceful, happy, fulfilled life (where I was also 10 pounds thinner, with a clean beautiful home, and a crowd of adoring fans). I’m embarrassed to say that out loud, but I think it’s the truth. And I don’t think that I’m the only one. There’s a reason all those books I read were bestsellers. A lot of America and a lot of well-meaning Christians are trying to figure it out.

But most of the time, we’re trying to figure out something that isn’t ours to know. We want to live by sight, not by faith, because that’s a whole lot easier. But it isn’t what God calls us to do. Otherwise, the Bible would read a whole lot differently.

If we’re concerned about what God wants us to do with our lives, we have all the answers we need. It’s all in the Bible. Sure, they aren’t always the answers our sinful nature wants us to have. They aren’t always the easy answers (no A plus B and bing! your life is golden). But they are all the answers we need.

I’ve finally resigned myself to this truth: God’s will for your life is for you to know Him, love Him, serve Him, and tell others about Him. I just gave you all the answers I have about my life and yours. It’s not a how-to guide, but it’s everything we need to know. Instead of trying to figure out some super-specific plans and goals, we need to be focusing our energy on the things that we already know God wants us to do with our lives: staying close to him, praying, reading his Word, serving others, spreading his Gospel. When we do these things, we can more easily accept our lowly vision and God’s almighty plans.