Know Your Why: Finding and Fulfilling Your Calling Shembull

Choosing Well

Making life choices is never easy. You leave college or university, and you have to make some kind of choice about what happens next. Or you are midway through your career, facing a crossroads, and you think, you sense, God might be calling you to something new. Maybe you have been made redundant in a job you were wedded to for years, and you are confronted by a whole new series of questions about where to go next. And the rent bills keep on coming, so there is a degree of urgency to your situation.

Of course, such choice is the privilege of the few, and we should always see it as such. But the speed of change in technology and the rapidly changing face of the workplace make choice at times frightening and overwhelming. It is almost as if we can’t cope with the number of alternatives: stay where we are, take some time out and return to work, work from home or remotely, study further, change our jobs or the way of doing them, join with others in doing something new, move to something more “spiritual” or “meaningful,” take a break from full-time volunteer work. The choices are dizzying.

But in my experience, they are made significantly easier by the knowledge that God calls us and is there to guide us. God first. That is the place to start.

The Bible makes it clear that God gives us a choice—he works with us, not just through us. For the most part, we are given the freedom to seek God’s ways and then to make choices. We do not operate independently from him, but neither are we puppets dancing on a string. Our personal callings are not commands but beckonings and promptings. We enter into them in partnership with God, making use of the opportunities that God presents to us and the passions that he has given us.

Wherever you are right now (assuming that you are walking closely with the Lord and what you are doing is neither immoral nor illegal) is where you are meant to be. Your calling is not in some elusive, otherworldly, unreachable place. Your calling is right here, right now. You are called to get on and live in the light of that calling.