Purpose & Calling
I have spent years in this field and I am only now wondering whether I ever asked God about it. Did I get it wrong?
“And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”
This psalm is attributed to Moses, who spent forty years in obscurity before anything he is now remembered for began. It sits in the middle of a sober meditation on how short human life is, and it ends by asking God to make ordinary human work last. That is not the prayer of a man confident his years were well spent. It is a request.
“But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk. And so ordain I in all churches.”
Paul writes to a chaotic church in Corinth where new converts assumed that following Jesus required changing every circumstance of their lives at once. His counsel is unexpectedly steadying: stay where you are and walk with God there. It is not a ban on ever changing course, but a refusal of the idea that your current situation is automatically a mistake needing to be undone.
A path forward
Pray about the years honestly this week rather than defending them. Ask God plainly what he wants done with the work you already have, and write down what comes.
Before considering a move, change one thing about how you do the job: who you help, how you treat the most difficult person there, what you do with your first hour.
Ask a friend to name what your work has produced in other people. The value of a decade is rarely visible from inside it.
Closing verse
“Man's goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way?”
- Proverbs 20:24
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