Monday, March 10, 2014

Realizing your calling

When I was young, I used to invite everyone to church. I guess I thought it was a pretty cool place to be! I'm sure all of my friends up into my teenage years got invited and was there at least once.
When I had my own children, they started asking their friends to come to church. I borrowed a friends truck and piled them into it on Wednesday nights and off we would go.

Now I have grand children, and I started taking them to our Wednesday night service called "kids club". After a while my 2 oldest grandchildren began inviting their friends, and soon my car became too small. Since my father is the pastor, I asked if I could use the church van, and pretty soon it was filled with screaming kids, a lot of them from under privaledged  families. After a while I started looking around for someone to help.  I told myself that children were not my calling. I was called to be a missionary.

One day I was talking to my daughter and I told her that I was trying to find someone to drive the church van. I was tired of the stress it was causing in my life. "Children are not my calling......"

I hadn't even finished the sentence when my daughter started laughing at me."What are you talking abut?" I was a little indignant.  "This is your calling mom, don't you remember when we were little and you drove us all to church! " this is you being missionary! "

It opened my eyes to a lot of things! Mostly to how wise she is! We talked about how these children had no one in their lives to show them love, or to be an example for them. She responded with "that's why He puts someone like you in their lives"

Wow!

So now when I pick up the van filled with screaming children, I look at them a lot differently. Do I still get tired? Yes. Do I sometimes want to pull over and throttle them all? Yes. Do I still have a headache from pure exhaustion at the end of every Wednesday? Well, not every ..................

I've always preached that God will not call us to do something without equipping us to do it. And I firmly beleive He doesn't call us to something that we wouldn't truly enjoy. The things we are passionate about. Nothing with God is ever random, or happens just "by chance". These things are all a part of His perfect design, His perfect plans.
Now I walk home after parking the church van filled with left over snacks and discarded memory verses. And as I'm walking, I'm smiling. 


This is me being a missionary! And I love it! Because this is my calling!