This week the Lord put it on my heart to talk about purpose. When this topic came up I wasn’t sure if the timing was right. We are getting ready to finish the school year and basically vacation for 3 months. If you are starting a new job you might feel like you have already found your purpose or it’s too late to choose another one. If it’s your last summer before college you may be excited to discover your purpose in the next season. If you are out of high school or college and working there may be a spark in you to really figure out what your purpose may be and if/how you can live it out.
The modern day word of “calling” is one that we hear thrown around a lot. It seems that so much pressure is put on figuring out what you are “called” to do with your life. When someone calls your name it is something that you audibly hear, you may not feel “called” to anything because you have never heard the audible voice of God. When the enemy makes us feel this way our overwhelmed mind can make us feel like we will never find our “calling” if we even have one. I am so excited to talk about this topic because it is something we all have wrestled with and will do multiple times through life. I am excited to share wisdom that was given to me and hopefully help you too figure out your purpose in life.
There are 1000 ways that we could choose to live our life. There are variations of jobs, cities, schools, and people that play into that. If you are like me and tend to live to get things write, you can become fixated on trying to pick the right combo for the best life. Can I tell you something? Whatever you choose God will bless you because you are his child. It can feel like one option is blessed and the other one isn’t but God has given you options because he trusts you, don’t we think we can trust him too?
There is this underlying lie we tend to believe that says we aren’t living out our purpose if it doesn’t look like xyz… We feel like we aren’t making a difference if we aren’t in a pastoral position, we think that we aren’t helping people if you choose the job of hairstylist of ministry, or we make ourselves feel like we are in the wrong lane because your occupation isn’t inside a church. God has given you a gift in a specific area that was designed for you.
In Matthew 22:37-39 Jesus gives us the greatest commandment. In fact you might even say he “calls” us to a higher purpose. He says, Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” We are called by God to first love him and then love people. Lightbulb moment… you are not called to do accounting, you are not called to work in retail, you are called to love God and to love his people.
A piece of advice given to me that changed my perspective on calling and purpose was this: your assignment will change but your calling never will. I love this advice because an assignment is the specific thing that we are doing to live out our calling. Our assignment is our occupation, what you are physically doing. Our assignments are things we all do differently. When you feel like you have no idea what your assignment should be, remember this, find what you love and find what you are good at, when those things align you have hit your sweet spot. There are areas that God has uniquely designed you to be good in.
1 Peter 4:10 says that each of us has received a gift. 1 Corinthians 12 shares how the body of Christ needs your gift in fact it can’t even function without it. If you feel your gift is unimportant then check again because God’s word says the gift believed to be unimportant is actually the most important. Your purpose is a gift that God has given only to you, how special is that? How kind of God to carve out a space in the world that only you could fit. The world needs your purpose and the world needs you.No one can help people that way that you can whether you are a doctor, a teacher, or working in the restaurant industry.
When you are giving people a diagnosis, you get to share God’s peace and comfort in a pretty serious moment. If you are a dentist cleaning someone’s teeth, you get to restore confidence in the body that God has blessed someone with. If you are teaching in a classroom you have the honor of caring for someone else’s child when you don’t know the reality of their home life. Your secular job has just as much impact if not more than the picture of “ministry” in your head. Whatever occupation you choose, it is not your purpose but you get to live out your purpose as you do it.
XO Scarlet