5. What barriers are preventing you from pursuing your true calling? Can you begin removing those?
6. If you aren’t engaging your gifts and talents where you find yourself now, could you make changes in your current role to better engage those? Don’t rule out the possibility that where you are is where you need to be.
When you’ve answered these questions, I suggest drafting a personal calling statement for your life. Remember to write in pencil, not ink, as it may change over time. My own personal calling statement reads, “To influence influencers through gathering, inspiring, connecting and equipping them to become change makers.”
Take the time to draft your own statement, because God has a unique purpose that He desires to carry out in you. It’s your niche, your uniqueness, that specific and significant thing God has for you. Sure, others will do similar work to yours, but they can’t do it exactly like you. Why?
Because you’re the only you there is.
Being a catalyst leader means you are working to identify, understand and pursue God’s unique call on your life with passion and patience. And once you locate that personal calling, guard it as a precious treasure.
Higher calling matters. When you care so deeply about the why—why you’re doing what you’re doing—then and only then are you operating in a way that allows you to overcome the obstacles. —Dave Ramsey, author and radio host
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, we find Frodo wondering why he has been chosen to carry the magical ring on such a perilous journey. Like us, Frodo doubts that a meager man like himself could effectively carry out such a daunting task. “But you have been chosen,” Gandalf says to Frodo, “and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”
Reflecting on this great line, author and pastor John Ortberg says, “This sense of having been called—the worthiness of it, the glorious goodness of a life lived beyond an individual’s agenda—is a precious thing. It is sometimes subverted into grandiosity. It is perhaps more often lost in the ministry of the mundane. It needs to be guarded.”
As we locate the warm embers of God’s calling inside ourselves, we must faithfully fan those flames. God desires for a sense of mission to burn within us, driving us forward in the perilous journey we call life.
My high school graduation is a distant memory, but the spark of purpose I felt that day has continued to burn. I believe God has a unique purpose that He desires to carry out in every single person He creates. He’s carved a specific and significant path for us all. This divine course is not mysterious or evasive, but walking it likely requires sacrifices. Yet you’re guaranteed to gain much more than you forfeit.
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Catalyst Leader by Brad Lomenick. Used with permission from Thomas Nelson, Inc.
