Bold With Purpose
Living intentionally and confidently.
Confidence had never been Miriam Osei-Bonsu's problem. Knowing what to do with it had.
She had grown up in Accra, the youngest of four siblings in a household where opinions were expressed at volume and ambition was considered a reasonable response to being alive. Her mother had run a tailoring business from the front room of their house with the particular authority of a woman who had never once doubted that what she made was worth paying for. Her father had taught secondary school mathematics for thirty years with the conviction that every student who sat in his classroom was capable of more than they currently believed, and that his job was to keep insisting on that until they believed it too.
Miriam had absorbed all of it. The confidence, the voice, the bone-deep sense that she had something to contribute and that contributing it mattered. What she had also absorbed, somewhere along the way, was a less useful addition: the habit of directing that energy toward whatever presented itself rather than toward anything she had deliberately chosen.
She was forty-three now, a Ghanaian-British events manager based in London, good at her work in the energetic, slightly relentless way of someone who has never learned to do anything at half capacity. She organised corporate conferences and charity galas and product launches with the kind of precise, high-energy competence that earned her consistent repeat business and a reputation that had grown steadily across fifteen years.
She was busy. She was successful. She was, if she was being honest with herself, a little bit lost.
Not visibly. Nobody who watched her move through a venue three hours before an event, headset on, checking sightlines and confirming catering timelines and remembering the names of everyone she had met twice, would have used the word lost. But underneath the motion, underneath the full calendar and the professional momentum, there was a question she kept not quite finding the time to sit with: is this what I am here for? Is this the specific thing I was made to do, or is it simply the thing I have been doing because I am good at it and it keeps moving?
The question had been growing louder for about two years. She had been keeping it at a manageable volume by keeping herself at an unmanageable pace.
That strategy ended on a Tuesday afternoon when she sat down in her car after a particularly long site visit, reached for the ignition, and simply did not turn it.
She sat there for forty-five minutes.
Not thinking, exactly. More: finally stopping the thing that had been stopping her from thinking.
She had been given, over the previous two years, a series of nudges she had acknowledged and then efficiently moved past. A woman at her church whose small community foundation for young girls in care was struggling without an operations manager, who had mentioned it to Miriam twice in the way of someone who was trying not to be pushy but was clearly hoping. A growing, specific restlessness every time she read about organisations doing work with young people from underserved communities. A recurring thought, which she had been treating as an impractical distraction, that everything she knew how to do, the logistics, the relationships, the capacity to make complicated things happen: could be pointed at something that mattered in a different way than corporate product launches.
She had not been ignoring these things out of indifference. She had been ignoring them out of the specific fear that lives underneath the confidence of capable people: the fear that if she tried to do the meaningful thing and it did not work, she would have given up the certain thing for nothing.
It was, she finally admitted to herself in that car park, a fear she had been dressing up as practicality.
She called her friend and mentor, a woman named Pastor Grace, that evening. Pastor Grace was in her early sixties, Barbadian-British, with a long history in community development work and the particular wisdom of someone who had made several significant pivots in her own life and could therefore speak to them without romanticising or minimising.
They met for coffee the following morning. Miriam told her about the car park and the forty-five minutes and the question she had been outrunning for two years.
Pastor Grace listened with the unhurried attention she always brought to serious conversations. Then she said: "Miriam. What would you do if the fear was not in the room?"
Miriam answered without hesitating, which told her something important: the answer had been ready for a long time.
"I would take the role at the foundation," she said. "And I would build its operations properly. From the ground up. The way I know how to build things."
Pastor Grace nodded. "Then the question is not what to do. You already know what to do. The question is whether you are willing to be bold enough to do it on purpose."
On purpose. Miriam turned that phrase over slowly.
Because that was precisely the thing she had not yet been. She had been bold in the reactive sense: confident in execution, reliable under pressure, capable of rising to most occasions placed in front of her. But boldness in the proactive sense, the intentional kind, the kind that walks toward a chosen thing rather than performing well in whatever shows up: that was different. That required something more than competence. It required conviction.
She went home that evening and opened her Bible with more deliberateness than she had brought to it in a while. She found herself in Jeremiah 1, the passage where God calls the young Jeremiah and Jeremiah's immediate response is to explain why he is not the right person: he is too young, he does not know how to speak, surely God has the wrong person.
And God's response was not to argue with Jeremiah's assessment or to offer a detailed rebuttal. He simply said: "Do not say I am too young. You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you."
Do not say. Not: your concerns are noted and here is why they are mistaken. Simply: do not let the wrong words become the loudest ones. Do not give your fear a platform it has not earned.
She sat with Ephesians 2:10 afterward, a verse she had known for years but had not recently examined in the context of her specific situation: "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."
Prepared in advance. Not: good works that you will improvise when you get around to it. Works prepared specifically and in advance, which meant there was something specific waiting for her attention. Something she was shaped for. Something that the gifts and the history and the capacity she carried were not accidental but pointed: aimed at a target that had been established before she arrived.
She had been using her gifts. She had not been directing them.
The difference between those two things, she was understanding now, was purpose.
She called the woman from church, whose name was Adaeze, the following morning. She had a long conversation in which she asked real questions and listened to real answers and at the end of which she said: "I think I am meant to help you. I would like to talk properly about what that could look like."
The silence on Adaeze's end was brief but full.
"I have been praying someone with your particular skills would find their way here," Adaeze said. "I may have been praying that for longer than I will admit."
Miriam smiled into the phone. "I may have been slower than I should have been," she said.
"You are here now," Adaeze said. "That is what matters."
The transition was not instant and it was not without cost. She did not walk away from fifteen years of professional infrastructure without careful planning and some significant financial adjustment. She reduced her commercial events work to part-time rather than disappearing from it entirely, which was the practical decision and the wise one. She joined the foundation in an operational capacity that was formally part-time and practically, because of who she was, considerably more than that.
The work was harder than her commercial work in some ways and easier in others. Harder because the resources were always tighter than the need and the problems were less straightforward than a conference timeline. Easier because at the end of every day, without exception, she knew exactly why she had done what she had done.
That was new. That was the thing that purpose added to competence: the clean, settled knowledge that the energy she was spending was spending itself on something that matched the specific shape of why she was here.
She thought about her mother's tailoring business in Accra, the front room and the fabric and the particular authority of a woman who knew her work was worth something. Her mother had never done anything randomly. Every stitch had been placed with intention. The result had not just been clothing: it had been the work of someone who understood that doing a thing with full commitment and specific purpose produced something qualitatively different from doing it with half attention and no direction.
Miriam understood that now in a way that was no longer theoretical.
She spoke at a women's event at her church six months into her new role, invited to share something of her journey. She stood in front of sixty women and said things she had not planned to say, because the planned things were less true than what was actually available to say.
"I was bold for years before I was purposeful," she said. "And boldness without purpose is just energy looking for somewhere to land. The thing that changed everything for me was not finding more confidence. I had plenty of that. It was finding the specific thing that my confidence was meant to serve."
She looked out at the room.
"God did not make you capable by accident," she said. "He made you capable for something. The question worth sitting with is not whether you are bold enough. It is whether you are bold enough on purpose."
The room was quiet in the way rooms are when something has been said that requires a moment before it can be responded to.
Miriam had not planned to be a speaker. She was an operations person. She built things and made things run. But she had learned, in the season that had changed her direction, that purpose had a way of expanding into the spaces you made available to it. That when you aligned what you were with what you were for, things happened that neither the confidence nor the capability could have produced alone.
She walked off that small stage and back into the room, where people were talking and children were running between tables and the ordinary warm noise of a gathered community filled every corner.
She was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Bold, yes. She had always been bold.
But now: on purpose.
And the difference was everything.
"For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." Ephesians 2:10
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