Finding Your Path
I'm so excited to share with you my Guest Blogger, Marissa Bylo. A beautiful soul with lots to say...Enjoy!!!
Well, when you’re young that answer might be anything from a singer to a nurse to a spy. For 10-year-old me, I wanted to write books. I fell in love with writing when I learned I could take all the thoughts and worlds in my mind and paint them on their own kind of canvas. I wrote stories and journals like a mad woman. But it was my little secret.
Then my family helped with starting a church, and I was introduced to community service. I knew of it from my dad who had aided in storm cleanups. But this was my opportunity, something right in front of me. So I started simple with tearing down the church services we held at the YMCA. This lead to helping in the kid’s ministry, and the service just increased from there. Fourth of July parades. Fall Festivals. I helped where I could.
I fell in love with service- this idea of helping others with any need, solving problems, and being useful. My junior year of high school I went on my first tornado clean up trip to Joplin, Missouri. The devastation broke my heart. The cleanup felt insignificant, small compared to the mess left behind, but it meant so much to the Joplin people; they were resilient and grateful. Community service became my anthem, another love alongside writing.
The writer who wants to help people. Where do you belong?
Cue my senior year of high school- a me who didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. My mom and I searched my future universities major list, looking for answers for the question I could never answer. That’s when it happened.
Nonprofit Administration.
The phrases “Changing the world begins from within. If you want to be an agent of change in yourself and the world…” and “learning by doing” stuck out like a beacon of clarification. We met with the chair department, and a God-given peace washed over me. I constantly second-guess, but this one thing remained clear…I had found where I needed to be.
Since then, my life transformed into something greater- this odd combination of being a servant and a leader. My love for service exploded; for seeing wrong things made right, fixing problems, and simply serving others. It has become my life motto – to leave this world better after my allotted time runs out. I added a minor of creative writing. The writer who loves to help people found her place.
I could tell you everything I’ve done since then, but my goal isn’t to make myself look like something perfect or to be envied. I’ve just taken my God-given gifts of empathy and problem-solving, my strengths, and found where I fit in this thing called Life. Life is richer and fuller when we look past ourselves for just a moment – not forsaking yourself but also considering others.
God has given each one of us some sort of gift, a purpose and task only we can do. The unique combination of DNA we each possess is like no one else’s; we were each made with a specific task. Pray, seek out that purpose. God says we will find Him when we seek Him with all our hearts. God designed a place for someone who wants to be everything. This writer with an empathetic spirit found where she belongs. He surely has a place for you. marissabylo.blogspot.com