I’m drawn to social injustices like flies to a summer picnic. Perhaps it’s my background in nonprofit work or the fact that my mom was constantly taking on some new charity initiative as I was growing up, but whenever I hear about a noble cause, I immediately start thinking how I can get involved.
Can you relate? You witness your friend collecting school supplies for struggling families or listen to a missionary speak at church or see the family with adopted children and think, “I should do that.” Witnessing the passions and involvement of the people around you sometimes even makes you feel like you’re not doing enough, or that you aren’t enough.
If I could have one superhero power, it would be the ability to fight a million world challenges—things like world hunger, sex trafficking, and poverty—all in one day. I would read to kids in schools and cook up dinner at a homeless shelter and coordinate a fundraising event and teach Bible study at church and march for human injustices . . . all within 24 hours!
I can certainly pray for all these things, but it is simply impossible for me to fix and take on so many causes. If I tried, I’d stretch myself so thin I’d never make a dent in any of the problems I was trying to solve. And it would be a little conceited and foolish of me to think I need to get my hands involved in everything in order for them to succeed.
Romans 12:4-6 reminds us that we don’t have to be cookie cutters of each other and that we can trust our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ with the work God has entrusted to them while focusing on our own gifts.
“Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.”
Pastor Andy Stanley gave me such great perspective on this topic. I heard him speak to a large group of ministry leaders, and he came right out and told each of us that we can’t change the world individually.
Duh. So true. And yet I needed that simple reminder. Instead, he said, we have to fight and serve in our own God-given arenas.
What is your arena? Pastor Stanley shared two questions we can ask of ourselves:
(1) Who are you?
(2) What breaks your heart?
When we think about the type of people God made us and the issues that affect us most deeply, it helps us cut through the extraneous (albeit valid) volunteer responsibilities and dig down to the most crucial areas in which God can work through us.
When my parents started foster parenting a year ago, I started thinking I needed to get involved with that as well. We’ve helped them out many times and hosted children at our home overnight, but I recently realized that foster parenting is my parents' thing. It’s a wonderful thing, but it’s not my thing. If I think about what breaks my heart, I find God pointing me to writing and speaking, specifically to the women of my generation.
(If you’re curious, what breaks my heart is this: young women, wives, and mothers overwhelmed to the max, barely staying afloat amidst the stress and distraction that prevent them from living passionately and fully for the Lord and others.)
So who are you, and what breaks your heart?
Be brave enough to ask that of yourself and pursue the calling the answer might identify. Or as Paul wrote from prison, “I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received” (Ephesians 4:1).
