Navigating the Highs and Lows of Your Calling
Ever heard of a funambulist? Well, I’m sure you have but you just didn’t call it that. A funambulist is a tightrope walker! Tightrope walkers are the balancing geniuses who study the art of walking across a stretched tight rope. There are many factors to help them not fall. Special tools for training, certain types of slippers and just the right balancing pole all work into his or her ability to walk across the tightrope with skill and confidence. The greatest attribute of the tightrope walker though, is a mental focus and agility like no other.
A calling is “a strong urge toward a particular way of life or career; a vocation.” As believers in the Word of God we believe that God gives the urge, the desire. He creates each of us with very specific yet unique purposes. Many days finding yourself in the zone of your calling gives an exhilaration like no other. But then there are the days when nothing goes as planned causing emotions of fear, anxiety and frustration to name just a few.
When walking the line of your calling how do you stay steady and grounded, not losing your footing? Like a tightrope walker, is there a way to be constant, solid, immovable and anchored even when many circumstances around you are swirling? How do you stay focused?
Stop and consider:
When was there a time in your calling/work when you were in the zone, all was working just as planned?
When was there a time in your calling/work when things went terribly wrong?
God made work for Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden of perfection. They experienced unhindered, free and unbroken surroundings. But today we must live and work in the tension of the same beauty but also brokenness in our imperfect, post-Eden world. What is the secret of navigating these highs and lows? Can we become skilled and agile as we try to balance it all?
In the book of James, in the Bible, you will find the tools and gear to help you keep balanced.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. James 1:2-8
In bold you’ll find the secrets:
Count it all joy knowing that steadfastness is being produced.
Ask God for wisdom.
Ask in faith without doubting.
There is liberating power in knowing and trusting God. Being steadfast in seeking Him will keep you from being “driven and tossed by the wind.”
While the highs of your calling are obviously easier to navigate, there is still the reminder that everything points back to God. In that same passage in James we read in verse seventeen, “Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow.” The highs are a gift for which to be thankful.
There’s something much more important for you than when your calling always goes as planned and seems to be a success. That’s a relationship with the Giver of the good work. Everything gets back to HIM.Allow Him to give you wisdom and enable you by the power and presence of His Spirit to help you find the balanced way of navigating your calling.
