3 Questions to Help You Find Your Calling in Life
Have you been trying to find your calling in life and coming up empty? You’re in the right place. Let’s jump right in and talk about how to find our God-given callings.
How to Find Your Calling in Life
I remember where I was the moment I decided I wanted to be a teacher. It was my junior year of high school, and I was sitting on a grassy hill watching mist ascend over viridescent fields. It was my favorite season of the year, the season that seemed to awaken every part of me, track and field season.
Sitting on the wet earth, I searched my life for the places that made me feel most alive, most filled with purpose.
I loved the woods and had always assumed I’d follow a career path in a field like forestry or wildlife biology. I loved creating things, and my tenth-grade English teacher told me I should write books.
Meanwhile, there was one passion that sparked a deeper sense of purpose in me: the sense that I was making a positive impact on the lives of others.
I felt this sense of purpose most when I was serving younger girls as a captain on the track and volleyball teams.
I sensed that others were watching, listening, and soaking in the words I spoke, and the sense of purpose that came with leading others surpassed anything I’d experienced.
Throughout my teen years, I didn’t spend too much time praying or studying the Bible, but I prayed on that hillside. I asked God to show me what I ought to write down as my major for my undergrad degree. Contrary to every part of my flesh, I sensed a call to lay down my desire to work in the woods and commit my life to serving others.
Find Your Calling in Life by Asking What Makes You Feel Passionate and Alive
I sensed that a calling is about more than just passion; it’s about using my passion to help others.
If you want to find your calling in life, ask where your passions lie, and then ask God to show you how he wants to use those passions to help others. Your calling is always about helping others. #calling #passioninlife #Godscalling Share on XI contemplated the small impact I’d made throughout my varsity athletic career, and I knew God could use the gifts he’d given me to make an even greater impact if I committed to a career as a classroom teacher.
Imagining life as a teacher, I grieved the loss of a life spent studying the growth of hardwood forests or the molecular composition of the soil.
I imagined long days beneath fluorescent lights, lesson plans, and progress reports. However, I also imagined the countless opportunities to impact the lives of young people, and I knew following this path held the potential to glorify God.
Ten years later, I found myself in the thick of my career as a high school special education teacher, and there were days when I almost lost sight of the calling.
There were days when managing behaviors felt like the dominant theme of my calling and thousands of hours of paperwork left me wondering if it was all worth it.
3 Questions to Help You Find Your Calling
Every time I questioned the calling, I was drawn back to these truths about what a calling actually entails: If you are struggling to find your calling in life, ask yourself these three questions:
1. How is God calling me to help others right where I am today?
If you want to find your calling in life, don’t get caught up in “what” you should be doing. Look at what you are already doing today. Ask God how you can join him in helping others right here, right now.
Most often, God does not lead us to the next open door until we begin honoring him in the way we live out his calling to love our neighbors in the place where our feet are planted.
Most of us get caught up in asking “what” we’re supposed to be doing with our lives. While this is a valuable question, the more important question is, How am I doing it?
It’s more important to do whatever we do with all our hearts (Colossians 3:23) and to do it with love (Luke 10:27) than to get caught up in the details of what it actually looks like.
2. What am I doing today to love God and love others with my whole heart?
Whether we’re called to scrub the toilets at the rest stop or run the biggest company in the region, we each have the same primary calling: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love others as you love yourself” (Luke 10:27, paraphrased).
The details of our callings do matter. Just as they matter to us, they matter to God. But what matters, even more, is keeping the first things first: Love God and love others while you do whatever you’re doing. (To read about how to be a difference-maker when you feel obscure and hidden, read here.)
3. Where do my passions in life collide with a human need God can use me to meet?
Your calling is where your passions in life collide with the needs around you in this world. This is the sweet spot of your calling, and, surprisingly, it’s not really about you. It’s about letting God use you to pour out his love to others.
For a follower of Christ, a calling will always involve using your God-given talents and gifts to love other people.
If your heart is hard toward people, you might find yourself struggling to unearth your calling.
It is when you see the needs before you that you are prepared to assess where your talents might reach into the brokenness.
Sadly, the person who leaps from one self-centered passion to the next, with no regard for serving others through her passions, will struggle to find the fulfillment she craves. It’s only when passions for people collide with passionate pursuits that lasting fulfillment comes.
Twenty years after my moment on the hillside, I’m no longer a classroom teacher. This reminds me that a calling can change with the shifting of seasons. God is creative enough to weave together a thread of passions that ultimately forms the tapestry of our lives.
A Free Devotional for You
The best way to find your calling in life is often fanning the flame of passion for God. It is from this relationship that clarity and calling come. Is it time to get the fire back in your walk with God? My free gift to you is my 10-day devotional, Fan the Flame. This devotional offers dozens of practical ways to connect with God. Click here, and I will send this devotional directly to your email inbox.
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Calling all moms and daughters!
Additionally, my teen daughter, Bekah, and I are passionate about helping moms and daughters grow closer while connecting with God. We have written two mother-daughter devotionals together. Girl to Girl: 60 Mother-Daughter Devotions for a Closer Relationship and Deeper Faith is written for girls ages 7-12. It includes 60 devotions with Scripture, conversation starters, and a shared journaling section after each devotion.
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