Offer books to readers everywhere – simply and on your own terms.
Offer books to readers everywhere – simply and on your own terms.
There comes a point in every healing journey when survival is no longer enough.
You wake up one day and realize that making it through, while sacred, is not the final assignment. Breathing again is not the same as building again. Escaping the worst of it is not the same as understanding why you were preserved. At some point, the soul begins asking a deeper question.
Why am I still here?
That is where purpose begins.
Not with applause.
Not with a title.
Not with perfect clarity.
Not with a finished plan handed down in one dramatic moment.
Purpose begins with the willingness to ask whether what you survived was meant to become something more than memory.
I asked that question more than once in my life.
I asked it in the silence of the cell.
I asked it in the long ache of fatherhood from a distance.
I asked it while trying to rebuild my name.
I asked it after my heart stopped and I came back breathing.
I asked it in writing, in prayer, in grief, in rooms where I could feel the weight of my own unfinished calling pressing against me.
Why am I still here?
And slowly 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. Something I would unlock once I had arrived—once I was successful enough, healed enough, established enough, impressive enough, clear enough. I thought purpose was waiting somewhere in the future, behind enough progress and enough proof that I had finally earned the right to carry it.
But suffering taught me something deeper.
Purpose was never hiding from me.
It was hidden in me.
Hidden in what hurt the most.
Hidden in what I could not stop caring about.
Hidden in the places where life broke me open and left me no choice but to ask what remained.
That is why I say now: purpose is revealed when pain is repurposed.
Not romanticized.
Not denied.
Repurposed.
That is different.
Pain, by itself, is not a purpose.
Pain, by itself, can destroy, distort, and silence.
But pain placed in the hands of truth, growth, and service begins changing form. It becomes instruction. It becomes compassion. It becomes an authority of a deeper kind. It becomes a path into rooms you would never have reached through comfort alone.
When I looked back over my life, I began to see patterns.
The injustice.
The isolation.
The heartbreak.
The silence.
The rebuilding.
The second chance.
They were not random.
They were not punishment.
They were preparing.
That realization did not make the pain easier to remember. It made the pain more useful to carry.
I began seeing that every painful chapter had taught me something I could not have learned any other way. Jail taught me how to hear myself. Silence taught me how to pray. Betrayal taught me discernment. Absence taught me the holy weight of fatherhood. Public damage taught me the difference between image and identity. The day my heart stopped taught me that breath is not ordinary and that delay is dangerous when purpose is waiting.
That is what purpose does.
It gathers the scattered lessons of suffering and begins organizing them into assignments.
That is why the question changed.
For a long time, I had asked, “Why me?”
But eventually I had to ask something stronger.
“What now?”
That question activates purpose.
“Why me?” can keep a person near blame.
“What now?” starts moving them toward contribution.
And contribution is where purpose comes alive.
Because purpose is not about being impressive.
It is about being impactful.
It is not about becoming a household name for the sake of visibility.
It is about becoming useful enough that your life leaves something real behind in other people.
It is about turning what nearly buried you into something that helps others breathe.
That is what began happening to me.
At first, the purpose looked personal.
That is always where it begins.
The first layer of purpose is healing you.
Understanding your story.
Accepting your past without surrendering your future to it.
Learning to live with honesty.
Building health, wholeness, and peace into the places where chaos once ruled.
Becoming a person whose inner life is no longer governed by fear, silence, and reaction.
That layer matters because you cannot pour from an empty heart.
You cannot lead people to healing from a place that still refuses its own.
You cannot build safely for others if your own foundation remains unexamined.
So personal purpose came first.
Writing.
Prayer.
Reflection.
Truth.
Healing the inner life.
Learning to carry pain without letting it define everything.
The purpose widened.
It became relational.
That is the second layer.
How does my healing now serve the people closest to me?
How does it change the way I father?
The way I listen?
The way I apologize?
The way I love?
The way I stop letting old wounds speak louder than present responsibility?
Purpose does not always need a stage.
Sometimes, purpose looks like becoming a safer father.
A truer friend.
A more grounded partner.
A man who does not pass down what he should have learned.
A person whose growth becomes shelter for the people who live closest to them.
That is still the purpose.
And then, in time, it widened again.
It became global.
That is the third layer.
Your story starts rippling outward.
It moves beyond private healing and begins to become of public usefulness.
Through art.
Through service.
Through mentorship.
Through writing.
Through speaking.
Through business.
Through ministry.
Through programs.
Through whatever form your obedience takes, when it stops asking only what helps you and starts asking what can help others.
That is where significance begins.
Not because the work becomes louder.
Because it becomes multiplied.
And when I looked honestly at my own life, I saw that all three layers were present.
Personally, I had been healed in ways I once thought impossible.
Relationally, I was being called to love my sons, my family, and the people closest to me with more intention and truth.
Globally, I was being pushed into books, rooms, youth work, speaking, mentorship, and the building of EHAS in ways that were clearly larger than my own private story.
That is how purpose activates.
Not usually all at once.
It builds step by step.
Most people wait for purpose to appear like a lightning bolt from heaven.
That is not how it happened for me.
Purpose was built.
It was built in daily obedience.
In one room at a time.
In one classroom at a time.
In one conversation at a time.
One page at a time.
In one act of honesty at a time.
At first, it looked small.
Writing to survive.
Sharing my truth with one group.
Helping one young man believe he was not alone.
Telling one room that pain does not have to have the final word.
Creating one story that might help one child see themselves differently.
Those were small bricks.
But purpose is often built from small bricks.
That is something I wish more people understood.
Purpose is never only about the grand gesture.
It is about consistent obedience.
It is about doing what you can, where you are, with what you have.
It is about saying yes before the full map is visible.
It is about trusting that each small act of service is part of a larger architecture you may not yet fully see.
That is how my life began shifting from testimony into mission.
Writing stopped being only my way of surviving and became a way to help others breathe.
Speaking stopped being only self-expression and became a service.
Mentorship stopped being an idea and became a responsibility.
Stories stopped being private lifelines and became tools.
That is when I knew purpose had become active.
Because something in me was no longer asking only how to heal.
It was asking how to help.
That is a sacred shift.
And it does not require perfection.
That is another lie people need freedom from.
You do not have to be perfect to be purposeful.
You do not have to be fully polished.
You do not have to have every answer.
You do not have to wait until the whole story is finished.
You just have to be willing.
Willing to tell the truth.
Willing to serve.
Willing to stop wasting what you learned.
Willing to believe that what you survived may contain medicine for someone else.
That willingness matters.
Because somebody needs what you have been through.
Somebody needs to hear what you learned the hard way.
Somebody needs your voice, your light, your witness.
Somebody needs the part of your story you almost buried.
Your story does not have to be polished.
It just has to be real.
That is what I mean when I say purpose is activated.
It is the moment your story stops being only something that happened to you and starts becoming something that can move through you.
I have come to define purpose this way:
Purpose is pain, plus growth, plus service.
Pain gives the story meaning.
Growth gives it power.
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.
And it is why purpose now feels less like a mystery to me and more like a responsibility.
Years later, 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 in fear, silence, confusion, 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.
But because it stops being wasted.
Walking through Nairobi, watching the art, the movement, the resilience, the color, the life, I felt something strongly: purpose is not found on a mountaintop somewhere far away.
Purpose is activated.
In choices.
In courage.
In service.
In the community.
In the daily willingness to say yes before you feel fully ready.
Kenya reminded me that purpose does not need a perfect plan.
It needs a decision.
A yes.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say to life is simple:
Use me.
Use my pain.
Use my survival.
Use my second chance.
Use my voice.
Use my books.
Use my story.
Use what nearly killed me to become part of somebody else’s reason to keep going.
That is what I said.
And in many ways, that is what I have kept saying ever since.
Because purpose is not a destination.
It is a decision.
It is the daily choice to 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 a person stops waiting and starts building.
That is when survival becomes stewardship.
And that, Mr. Bunting, is what I want this chapter to leave behind.
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 purpose is not something you have to go out and find.
It is something you must be willing to activate.
