Have you ever met someone who just seemed to have it all together? They seemed like they were doing exactly what they were put on this earth to do? Maybe they’re making a ton of money or saving hundreds of orphans or changing the way we use technology. Whatever it is, we look at people who are doing amazing things and we want to be like them.
Some of this is good! These people are inspiring. They make us want to be bigger, better, more energized versions of ourselves. The issue comes when we start trying to take on their calling as our own. We are not only inspired by them and perhaps want to do what they do, we want to BE them. We then strive for the life they have or we secretly long for it, constantly dissatisfied with our current lives. We end up spending so much time and energy and resources on a calling that is not ours, it is someone else’s.
When we try to take someone’s calling as our own, we end dissatisfied and bitter. We wonder why everything isn’t working out for us like it worked out for them. We wonder why this is so much harder, things aren’t lining up, and we keep hitting closed doors.
Each person has been given a certain set of skills and certain amounts of strength to do different things. One person’s calling might be, metaphorically, scaling mountains. Because that is their calling, they have certain tools in their backpack that makes them more likely to succeed. Another person’s calling might be to create an oasis in the desert. In their backpack are vastly different tools than the tools in the mountain climber’s.
This is not to say that we cannot gain skills that we need to do many different things, because we can and we need to! What we want, though, is to walk into what God has called us into. When we are aligned with the journey that God has called us on, we will find joy, grace, passion, and knowledge available to us that is mostly absent when we are trying to live someone else’s life.