It was midnight and I was hitchhiking home to California on Interstate-5. A trucker stopped to pick me up. A trucker with a daughter my age. On the drive south, he said he’d take me all the way to the California bay area, but he encouraged me to return to school.

Photo by Sneaky Head on Unsplash

One of the girls at the boarding high school I attended had been making my life miserable. And of course she recruited her best friend and anyone else who would join her in hating me. Which basically felt like everyone.

I put up with it for a few months, but finally couldn’t take it anymore.

Our pastor has been teaching through the life of Elijah. In chapter 19 of 1 Kings, Elijah is sitting in a cave on Mt. Horeb when God asks him, “What are you doing here?” (verse 9). And then God asks the exact same question a few verses later.

“Every decision we’ve made,” said Pastor Trevor, “has led us to where we are today.”

The trucker with the daughter my age managed to convince me to return to school. Dropped off at a truck stop just before the Oregon/California border, I remembered an acquaintance—a student at Southern Oregon College at the time. Her number was listed in the tattered phone book hanging from a chain in a phone booth. It was 2:30 am. She drove down to the truck stop in her little Volkswagen Bug and propelled me back to school.

The girl who had started the hate campaign against me was head Resident Assistant. She had stayed up watching for me, not yet reporting my absence. And the girls’ dean was none the wiser.

Here’s the thing:

If I’d been caught out of the dorm after lights out, I would have been sent home. I wouldn’t have been around to attend my best friend’s family reunion after graduation that year. I wouldn’t have met her brother from Denver at that reunion, and later I wouldn’t have married him. We wouldn’t have had our children and subsequently our grandchildren. I wouldn’t have been living in Bend when he died, and I wouldn’t have met Dan a few years later.

That one decision to return to school helped propel the course of my life.

If God planned all those twists and turns and this later-in-life marriage to this good man, then what is it I’m doing here?

Part of the answer involves being wife to Dan, and a welcomer of Dan’s and my children and grandchildren into our home.

What I’m doing here is serving alongside my husband in volunteer opportunities and hospitality—readying our home for any guests God sends our way, hosting two life groups, a women’s Bible study, and a monthly writers’ critique group—people I would never have known had I hitchhiked all the way to California that night.

What I’m doing here is writing—for our church blog, as a contributing writer for Grit & Grace, with a few stories published in both Chicken Soup for the Soul books and Bella Grace magazine. And hoping to get a book published.

I love what I’m doing here.

What are you doing here?

There’s a favorite verse from Ephesians that goes like this:

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

– Ephesians 2:10

Had you ever thought that there’s nothing accidental about your being here? You have been placed here on purpose, with purpose.

Which begs the questions: What are you doing where you live? in your neighborhood? at your job? at your church?

What is it God sent you there to do?

To intercede in prayer for others because mobility or poor health limits you physically? Work with children, teenagers, or seniors, because God’s given you relatability to a particular age group? Do the best job possible for your employer? Learn EMT skills or Spanish? Volunteer to clear trails, listen to second graders read, or play the violin at an assisted living facility every Thursday evening? Teach computer skills, pottery, or sign language? Rescue people, fight fires, or save lives as a first responder or medical professional?

So many possibilities for your one, available, wild, creative, irreplaceable life. Because you contribute to the whole and without you … well, there’s a hole.

Perhaps we could all ask ourselves the question, “Why am I here?”