One Simple Way to Find Your Elusive Calling

Sunday night finds me watching a few clips and pieces from the If:Gathering 2015. When I saw that Shauna Niequist was interviewing her mom, Lynne Hybels, I wanted to watch. I had seen Shauna speak on what her mom taught her about calling on the web sometime last fall, and it encouraged me. But it stirred up all. the. many. questions. about. my calling. The more I thought about it, I happened upon one simple way to find your elusive calling.

Monday morning, I am tired, and I want to snuggle in bed longer, to linger. But instead I get up and take a shower. In the shower, I think about life and motherhood and this thing called calling and how I wake up some days wishing I was a Beth Moore or one of the beautiful ladies who spoke at the If:Gathering, not because of their fame, but because they have found their calling. They know who the Lord has designed them to be, and they run after it passionately. I envy their knowing. Instead, I feel as though I am approaching 40 wondering if I my writing is beautiful or good and why in the heavens, do I still feel like I am looking for this thing called, “calling,” not to mention that life and being a wife and momma seems to conflict all. the. darn. time.

Since October, I have been working on a new Internet home for this blog. One that is more thoughtful of you and more focused on serving you as readers, but since December, I have not written a thing. It is the first time since I’ve started blogging in 2008 that I’ve been silent and simultaneously peaceful. Often, I need to write to quiet myself, but how can I write in service to you if I am serving myself?

I thought about that – about how I am finding home and finding peace outside of what feels like my calling, and I realize that in the quiet and still, I am able to bring myself before the Lord, and lay my writing and dreams upon the altar and ask Him to do as He wills in a very honest way. This week my soul, however, began nudging me to come back to writing.

I think about calling like I have come to think about a soul mate. A soul mate is the world’s romanticized version of true love. That’s not to say that soul mates do not exist – it’s to say that even the most unlikeliest of peoples can marry, and with God in the midst, He can take and make them into soul mates over the course of a life time. Being a single woman and looking for a mate, I married based on a dream, but even a dream does not make a marriage. A marriage comes together with God first, love, sweat, and tears, hope, faith, and continually working. Marriage is hard work – the best and hardest thing I’ve done.

Sometimes the doors of opportunity and calling don’t swing wide. Maybe some people like Beth Moore are made for specific callings, and they are so gifted in what they do that the door swings wide and opens easily, but even Beth testifies to a lengthy process of finding her calling (if perchance Beth ever reads this – I love you dearly, it’s just that looking at well accomplished ladies is hard for us “average” ladies). What if, like soul mates, maybe most of us are made for many callings, and as we do something, we become something. The problem when searching for the elusive calling is that we often give up while looking for it. We want it to be easily found. This is how we get stuck.

While I don’t know much, this is what I know. Calling is something active you do, but it feels easy and provides rest for your soul most of the time, but it is still work.

The easiest way to find the elusive calling, however, is simple. Stop looking for your calling. You can read all the books out there, and I am not saying those books are not helpful or important in finding your calling, but if you are like me, you’ve read them all, along with every blog post, even gone so far as to take how to classes on it, and still you wonder, what the heck, where is my calling? Instead of seeking calling, do this one simple thing.

Follow Jesus. You know He said, “Come, follow me.”

Later the same day I was asking my girlie friends, “How do you know the difference between dying to self and living abundantly?” as if they were mutually exclusive, because let’s get real, dying does not seem like living.

But I was careful in how I worded it because one of those girlies has a special needs son, whom she homeschools right now, and for her, looking for an elusive calling is not so much a choice. That’s when I realized something. Looking for a calling is not actually a biblical thing, and it’s kinda a first world problem, not to be harsh, because again I have spent hours, many hours, thinking about my giftedness, both naturally and spiritually; I have thought about my personality type, my experiences, and I’ve been through every thing known to man to find out how to really live happily, abundantly. All those things can be very important for finding the calling, but honestly, there is one way.

When we approach calling as if we’ve been made to do this one important thing, we’ve made the calling the treasure. Jesus is always the one important thing, and when we follow Him, before we’ve even noticed it, we’ve found this thing called calling. Maybe it looks small and undistinguished. Maybe finding your calling looks more like dying and cross bearing than abundant living. Maybe it is simply falling in love with a Savior and saying, “wherever He leads I will follow.” For me, it looks like persistent persevering and seeking the Savior.

“Come.” He says. I come running, simultaneously dying to dreams, dying to self, and living an amazing, abundant life of loving Him. How does that looks specifically for me? It changes every day. Sometimes it looks a lot like cleaning house, other days it looks like I am a writer, sometimes, it looks like a mom who loves her husband and kids. Sometimes, it is all very ordinary.

“Come.” He calls. This is the calling. And in Him, I find home. I am found and called.