Finding My Voice

I have always felt a little different, like I never quite fit in anywhere, like my voice was different.

I want to live unique and authentic, I think so many of us do because I believe we were all created unique with a special purpose. To walk a unique path comes with some discomfort I think. How do we blaze our own trail and find comfort in the discomfort, of true uniqueness. My voice, my path, my God given purpose is different than yours.

After graduating high school I worked a full time job to save money to move out on my own in Toronto and pursue an acting career. At this time many of my friends were starting post secondary education, I looked around at what they were doing with their lives, compared myself to them and felt very insecure about the decisions I was making. My path looked different and it made me second guess myself. In this season my voice was shaky at best.

While living and working in Toronto I searched for something to validate my voice. I was searching for attention and not properly applying myself to my craft and so my voice got completely lost. I was evicted from my apartment and forced to move home.

Over the next few years I worked a variety of different jobs hoping one would give me my voice back, one particular career in a local marketing firm promised to give me the personal validation I was looking for. I loved this job, the people I working with, our clients and it did provide me with so much personal and professional growth. It challenged me in many ways and brought me so much joy. But looking back I can see that even then I was putting too much of my voice and value on my career. You see, a job is never for sure, no worldly title is ever for sure.

As a recently promoted VP of a local marketing firm, wife and soon to be mom, I was starting to feel confident in myself. I had decided that I would only take half of my maternity leave and return to work early, I wanted to keep moving on the path I was on. During my pregnancy though I did begin to experience extreme anxiety and for the first time ever I had a full blown anxiety attack. I have since then learned I am not great with change and big life transitions. I like to be in control so as I prepared for the unknown of becoming a mother, I was very anxious.

I want to side step here for a minute, I grew up going to church with my family, I knew all the Bible stories from Sunday school, I talked to God and I knew the basics of how He wanted me to live my life. But it wasn’t until I was 29 that I fully handed my life over to God. I decided I couldn’t do life without Him in the driver seat. I started to dive into the Bible one verse a day through the YouVersion Bible App to help calm my anxiety, I searched for scripture and promises from God to tame my wild soul.

Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart, I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations.

This verse became one of my favourites, it gave me so much hope and purpose!

As I eased into motherhood with God leading the way now, He placed a new dream on my heart, I suddenly did not want to return to work early or at all for that matter, I wanted to be a stay at home mom. I was so confused and nervous about this new dream and scared to share it with Tyler as we had never discussed me being a stay at home mom so I prayed on it for months until I felt it was the right time to talk to Tyler about it. When I brought up how I was feeling about being a stay at home mom, he responded with “I have been thinking the same thing”, I knew this was God at work in our lives.

My first few years at home I like to call “going to the school of God”. If you have ever been home with babies you know it can be a little isolating but God pulled me back for a reason, He was preparing my heart and voice for the world. In those early stay at home mom years I had lots of time to talk to God and read the Bible and get to know Him without very much outside distraction or opinion. I was blogging at this time and working a little on weekends with my freelance makeup artistry business but it was mostly me God and my family. I have learned that getting to know God strengthens our abilities to trust Him. Think about your worldly dad, you have known him your whole life, if he makes a promise to you, you know he will keep it. We can get to know our Heavenly Father through the Bible and become familiar with the promises He has for us, our world wants to tell us otherwise but when we know the world of God it’s easier to stand firm on that and trust it. And so I find my voice in this current season where I have been blessed with a growing platform, in God and The Word. I am able to steady my voice in an unsteady world in unsteady circumstances because God, The Bible and God’s promises are steady and never changing.

I stand here today with lots of dreams and goals for my family, my business as an Influencer and Event Planner but if all of that changes I know my voice can stay calm and steady because it’s now rooted in God, not the things of the world. And for us to blaze truly original trails and speak with an authentic voice we need to get to know our creator, He is the only one who can guide us on the one of a kind path we were designed for.

xoxo

Audrey