Offering our Calling
I recently returned from a missions trip to Cairo, Egypt. If you’ve ever been on a missions trip, know that God shows you A LOT of things about the country and the people, but also about yourself. And when you get home, it's often so hard to wrap your own mind around it all, let alone try to explain it to anyone else. For me, God revealed many things (much of it on just the first two days of the trip) and when I got a bit overwhelmed! But He encouraged me, saying, "Don't worry! You don't have to understand it all right now. I will reveal more to you, let's take it one step at a time!"
One of these things that God showed me came from the second day of my Cairo trip. Our team met with a group of missionaries who use social media to spread the gospel. One missionary shared with us about her journey from complacency about Jesus to now leaving the comfort of the United States to serve in Cairo. She discussed the challenges as a woman serving in a predominately-Muslim, third-world country. And she also talked about the difficulties of not having enough people to reach out to areas in the Arab world, where most of the people are unreached with the news of Jesus and the gospel. When I asked her what might be the reason so few people come to areas like this, her response stirred something in me that is still giving me cause to ponder and seek God: “We often talk about calling, but we don’t talk nearly enough about offering.”
“ “We often talk about calling, but we don’t talk nearly enough about offering.” ”
At first, I interpreted that statement as if I needed to lower the emphasis on calling in order to focus on offering. You know, like Romans 12:1 where we are urged to "to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God." I took it to mean we have to be more focused on being sacrificial. That calling was competing with our offering. We want to have a title or position to feel qualified to go to hard places (maybe even Cairo) where life is tough, where you will sacrifice all of who you are in order to reach the broken people in broken places. And that may be true, God may call you to some hard places or seasons where you give up the entitled ideology that we sometimes place on the concept of calling. But after turning this idea over in my mind a couple times, I think of offering not as being in competition with calling, but rather deepening the concept of calling. If we look at calling in terms of offering, we can refocus. This makes our calling more about our character, giftings, and attributes—placed in God's hands—so it is not merely attached to a specific title or position.
“This makes our calling more about our character, giftings, and attributes—placed in God’s hands—so it is not merely attached to a specific title or position. ”
Being a former teacher, who now works as an admin assistant in an office, I can see how, even in my new context, I am called to be a teacher. The teacher calling didn't leave me when my title and position changed. I still offer the skills, talents, and abilities that gave glory to the Lord in the classroom, now I just use them in the office. And maybe you feel a call to be in women's ministries, but instead of working in a church, with the title of women's ministry director or pastor, you work in an office. And in that office, somehow, God always seems to bring a woman in your path who needs the exact giftings that you have. Or you feel called to be a worship leader, but you worship with your lifestyle and influence in a marketplace setting instead of a church service.
Or maybe you do work in a church, with the title of pastor, where you are called to full-time ministry. In that context, what makes you successful and brings God glory is that you offer all you have to Him and His ministry.
I encourage you to examine your current context. Examine your calling and ask yourself, "Do I interpret my calling through the lens of a title and position, or do I interpret it as an offering to the LORD, a gift I can give to honor him?" I hope this view will help me to be more open to what God wants me to be and where he wants me to go, because my calling is attached to him and not to my title. And I am hoping the same for you.