Offer books to readers everywhere – simply and on your own terms.
Offer books to readers everywhere – simply and on your own terms.
Nairobi does not sit still.
The city moves like it knows something urgent. The streets pulse with traffic, color, voices, dust, prayer, enterprise, and hunger—not only the hunger of need, but the hunger of people who have decided life will not wait for perfect conditions before they begin living on purpose. The matatus alone look like rolling declarations, painted in bright colors, covered in art, scripture, fire, and movement, as if even the vehicles have something to say about resilience. Nairobi felt alive to me in a way that was impossible to ignore. It did not feel like a city waiting for permission. It felt like a city already in motion.
That mattered because by the time I got there, I had already survived enough to know that survival is sacred—but survival is not the end of the story.
There comes a point in every healing journey when making it through is no longer enough. You wake up one day and realize that breathing again is not the same as building again. Escaping the worst of it is not the same as understanding why you were preserved. And whether you say it out loud or not, one question begins rising from somewhere deep:
Why am I still here?
I had asked myself that question more than once.
I asked it in the cell.
I asked it in the silence.
I asked it after the shame.
I asked it while rebuilding my name.
I asked it after my heart stopped and I came back breathing.
I asked it in prayer, in grief, in writing, and in that strange space where a man knows he has been spared but is still trying to understand what the sparing was for.
And over time, the answer became clearer.
I was not just saved from something.
I was saved for something.
That sentence changed everything.
Because for the longest time, I thought purpose was something outside of me. Something I had to chase, earn, unlock, or somehow become successful enough to deserve. I thought purpose would arrive once I had “made it.” Once I was healed enough. Polished enough. Clear enough. Stable enough. But sitting in a jail cell, stripped of everything I thought defined me, I learned a deeper truth:
Purpose is not hiding from you. It is hidden in you.
And most of the time, it is hidden in the places that hurt the most.
What broke me?
That is where the clue was.
What nearly buried me?
That is where the assignment started speaking.
What I survived became the place where my why began revealing itself.
Not in comfort.
Not in applause.
Not a success.
In the rubble.
In the betrayal.
In the silence.
In the second chance.
That is why I say now that purpose is revealed when pain is repurposed.
Not denied.
Not glorified.
Repurposed.
That is different.
Pain by itself is not a purpose. Pain by itself can distort, isolate, and break a person open in all the wrong ways. But pain surrendered to growth, truth, and service begins changing form. It becomes instruction. It becomes wisdom. It becomes compassion. It becomes credibility of a deeper kind—the kind not earned in classrooms, but in survival.
When I looked back over my own life, I could see patterns.
The injustice.
The isolation.
The heartbreak.
The absence.
The silence.
The rebuilding.
The second chance.
They were not random.
They were painful, yes.
Unfair, yes.
But they were also preparing for me.
Every painful chapter had taught me something I could eventually use in the service of somebody else. Jail taught me how to hear my own soul. Shame taught me what silence costs. The lies taught me the value of truth. Missing my sons taught me the holy weight of presence. My heart-stopping experience taught me that time is not guaranteed, and “one day” is a dangerous phrase when it becomes a hiding place for calling.
That is why the deeper question changed.
For a long time, I asked, “Why me?”
But eventually I had to ask something stronger:
What now?
That is when purpose turns on.
Because “Why me?” can keep a person near blame.
“What now?” starts moving them toward contribution.
And contribution is where purpose becomes active.
I felt that truth strongly in Nairobi.
I met a young man named Joseph who ran a storytelling circle for teens in Kibera. He said something to me that I have never forgotten:
“My story started with survival, but I chose to end it with purpose.”
That line stayed with me because I knew that journey. I knew what it meant to begin in survival. To begin with, fear, confusion, shame, silence, and pain. To begin in a place where all you can do is make it through the next day. But I also knew the power of that choice—to end with purpose. Not because the pain disappears. Because it stops being wasted.
While I was there, I was invited to speak at a youth center. I looked into the eyes of young people who had already faced more struggle than many adults ever will. But I did not see pity in that room. I saw potential. I saw movement. I saw purpose waiting to be unlocked. I saw the same thing I had once felt in myself but had not yet known how to name. And walking the streets afterward, watching those bright matatus move through the city like declarations on wheels, I realized something beautiful:
Purpose is not something you find on a mountaintop. It is something you activate.
In choices.
In courage.
In service.
In the community.
In the daily willingness to say yes before you feel fully ready.
That is one of the greatest lies people need freedom from.
They think the purpose will arrive complete.
That it will announce itself in a perfect plan.
That clarity must come before movement.
That readiness must come before obedience.
But that is not how it worked for me.
Purpose was built.
Step by step.
Choice by choice.
Act of service by act of service.
It started small:
authoring stories to process my pain,
sharing my truth with one classroom,
helping one young man believe he was not alone,
creating one book,
starting one conversation,
building one program at a time.
Those were small bricks.
But small bricks, repeated in obedience, become structure.
That is how purpose grows.
Not usually in one grand gesture.
Not in one speech.
Not in one breakthrough moment that explains everything.
It reveals itself through consistent obedience. The more I spoke, the more I understood that people did not need my perfection. They needed my truth. They did not need me to look unbreakable. They needed me to be honest enough that their own pain could breathe. And the more I served, the more I understood that purpose is not about being impressive.
It is about being impactful.
That realization gave me language for something I had already been living.
Purpose has layers.
The first layer is personal.
That is where it begins: healing you. Understanding your story. Accepting your past without letting it own your future. Finding some peace inside your present.
Building health, honesty, and wholeness in the parts of your life that were once governed by fear. You cannot pour into others from an empty heart.
The second layer is relational.
Once healing begins, purpose starts affecting the people closest to you. It changes the way you love, forgive, listen, and show up. It changes fatherhood. Friendship. Leadership. Presence. Your purpose does not always need a stage. Sometimes it looks like becoming a better parent, a more honest partner, a safer friend, a man who stops passing down what he should have healed.
The third layer is global.
That is when the story begins, rippling outward through art, service, mentorship, ministry, business, or community work. You become a bridge for others to cross from pain to possibility. Purpose multiplies when it serves beyond you. That is where significance begins—not because you become famous, but because what you have survived starts helping somebody else live.
That is why Nairobi mattered so much to me.
It showed me purpose in motion.
Not polished.
Not waiting.
Not asking permission.
Alive.
And it made me realize something else: purpose is not found in searching.
It is found in serving.
That is where so many people miss it. They keep looking inward only, hoping purpose will finally reveal itself in some perfect feeling of certainty. But purpose often becomes visible only once your life starts moving outward. When you ask:
Who can I help with what I have learned?
Who can I love because I know what it feels like to be unloved?
Who can I guide because I have been lost?
Who needs my voice, my witness, my survival, my light?
That is purpose activated.
And because I needed something concrete to hold onto, I eventually found language for it:
Purpose = Pain + Growth + Service
Your pain gives the story meaning.
Your growth gives it power.
Your service gives it reach.
Without pain, there would be no depth.
Without growth, there would be no wisdom.
Without service, there would be no multiplication.
That is the equation I have experienced.
By the time I left Nairobi, I knew again what I had been learning for years:
I did not go through all of that just to stay the same.
I did not survive just to survive.
I was here to build.
To teach.
To tell the truth.
To serve.
To help other people make meaning out of what almost destroyed them.
And perhaps most importantly, I knew this:
I did not need a perfect plan.
I needed a yes.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say to life is simple:
Use me.
Use my pain.
Use my survival.
Use my voice.
Use my writing.
Use my experience.
Use my second chance.
Use what nearly killed me to become part of somebody else’s reason to keep going.
That is what I said in Nairobi.
And in many ways, that is what I have kept saying ever since.
That is what I want this chapter to leave behind for the reader.
Stop waiting to feel ready.
Readiness is often overrated.
Conviction matters more.
Purpose is not a destination.
It is a decision.
It begins the moment you stop asking only what life took from you and start asking what your life can still give.
That is when the fire turns on.
That is when significance begins.
That is when survival becomes stewardship.
That is when the story stops being only about what happened to you and starts becoming something that can move through you.
And if Nairobi taught me anything, it is this:
Purpose is not hiding from you.
It is waiting for your yes.
Story Work: Activating Your Purpose
Take a few quiet moments and answer these honestly:
Write it down.
Say it aloud.
Because the purpose is not to wait somewhere far away.
It is waiting for your yes.
