But here’s the thing: Often we don’t choose our careers; they choose us. During my last year in high school, I recall thumbing through different career options and checking out the earning potential and job availability for each of my interests (my personality quiz scored funeral director as the highest). I preferred words over coffins, but journalists had no job security and the pay was atrocious!
Discouraged, and with no idea where to go to college, my step-mom set up an interview for me at a large corporation a few weeks before graduation. A year later, they encouraged me to take a few accounting courses. Thirty years later, I am still working in finance as my ‘tent-making’ job.
It’s proven to be a dependable, decent paying gig . . . but not one that I chose at all. I got caught up in ‘the facts’ and failed to seek His direction. Instead, I stumbled through life on an unplanned path.
Inside each one of us is a crazy dream career or ministry— one that we perhaps have told no one about . . . but, it stirs us. We can’t help but smile when we think about it. It’s stolen a sweet spot in our hearts and we burn to see it come to fruition. Yet we stare at ‘the facts’ and often choose a safe predictable job instead.
God gives us passions, skills and dreams. If your friends and family say that you have a gift . . . who are you to squander it?
Live a brave life! Hit your knees and ask the Lord if this dream is truly from Him and if he’s calling you to it. You may have to take on a tent-making job to support yourself as He makes a way for you, but don’t bury your talent! God has designed each of us to do passionate work:
What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, (Ecclesiastes 2:22-24 ESV)
