What is your calling?
How do you pursue it?
What does it matter?
When I think about calling, I imagine it like puzzle pieces; God gives us one piece at a time throughout our life and in the end as you put them together, it paints a beautiful and heavenly picture for us that shows God’s heart and purpose for the world. My personal experience and understanding of calling is to follow God’s purpose for me and for the world. Paul describes this purpose in 2 Timothy 1:9,
[Our Lord God] “[...] saved us and called us with a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.”*
A while back, one of my good friends asked me “How did you imagine what you could be?” It took me a while to remember the dreams I had when I was a kid but I finally did. I remembered that as a kid I always wanted to become a lawyer to defend people, to fight for injustice and to be a defender for voiceless women. I had no doubts that I would become a lawyer.
But today I am not a lawyer.
I never studied Law and I don’t think I’ll ever study Law.
Instead, I studied German and Linguistics, I went to Germany after my BA Degree for a month. I then found out I couldn’t go back home, because I was practicing my newly found Christian faith. So I came to England instead, and gradually started to feel drawn to evangelism...
I had the most heartbreaking moment of my life once I started going out knocking on the doors of students in Fallowfield in Manchester to offer prayer and share the love of Jesus with them. It broke my heart because it reminded me of myself. I once was also a student, I once was lost, I once was confused and yet I knew something was missing hugely in my life, that was Jesus. That deep heartbreak was my “ignition moment”** – the moment I sensed a strong call to students and student mission. How did I know it was my calling? I felt it. I felt a deep sense of conviction in my heart that I could not deny. I didn’t hear God’s actual voice telling me students, students, students; I felt it. And now, each time I feel the same way I know that it is from God.
I was just an ordinary person with ambitious dreams, but God gave me a less ordinary calling. It was not one that you get everyday; it was compelling and undeniable. Recently, God spoke to me a lot about calling through Rich Wilson’s new book, A Call Less Ordinary. As I read the first page, I noticed something different and refreshing about calling. Something that resonated with me. One of my fave quotes in his book is,
“Your childhood doesn’t define you, but God does, and he’s been working in you from day one.”***
I love this because today as I look back to my childhood dream I know that it was God who gave me the dream and vision to be a defender and it was he himself who's been shaping me since the beginning. I am so humbled to see that today I am becoming what I always imagined I could be. Only in a different way to anything I imagined.
How about you? How did you imagine what you could be? How do you see yourself now?
Why not grab your own copy of A Call Less Ordinary here and read more...
*https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Timothy+1&version=ESV
** Rich Wilson, "A Call Less Ordinary," (Great Britain: Ashford Colour Press, 2020), 1.
*** Rich Wilson, "A Call Less Ordinary," (Great Britain: Ashford Colour Press, 2020), 2.
