If you’ve made the decision to give your identity as a professional, parent, or student over to God and said to him, “Use me, change me, make me the person you want me to be” then you’ve already made a giant stride on your way to greatness. You’ve looked at yourself in the mirror and found the reflection lacking, but instead of stuffing your findings in a dusty file drawer in the back of your mind, you’ve turned to Christ. Excellent. Now what?

Well, certainly what God will tell you now is something figured out through a lot of prayer and a lot of counsel. You would make a mistake to assume that tomorrow you should go to your boss, hand in the two-week notice, and brush the envelope dust off your hands. Or that you should announce to your college professor, “I now realize that differential equations are irrelevant to the larger call of the Lord so I won’t be taking today’s mid-term.”

I’d like to recommend an exercise I’ve given to prospective newlyweds, which I’ll include here. Some of this is borrowed material from other sources, notably a worksheet put together by a Christian brother, Mark Bair. If you’re married, do this exercise with your spouse. Do it separately before coming together to discuss your thoughts.

Shared Vision Exercise 

First, write a mission statement for your life. For example, you might write, “To reflect God’s love in every role that I play in life as a parent, employee, supervisor, son, brother, and neighbor.” You might start by brainstorming words that describe who you are and your interests and hopes. Then take those words and create your mission statement.

Second, how does the mission statement you wrote stack up with the biblical position about a Christian’s mission? Check Matthew 28:18–20; Mark 10:45; 1 John 3:16.

Third, where do you see your life five and ten years from now? This question has several components:

1. What factors are likely to be definite in your life five and ten years from now? Write these down using simple declarative sentences, i.e. I’ll be thirty-three or thirty-eight; my parents will be in their fifties, sixties, etc.; the children will be eight or ten, going to school; I’ll be done with school; I will have worked at the same place ten years, etc.

2. Think about where you’d like to be in five and ten years, as a spiritual person? This question is meant to help you spell out an immediate vision for carrying out the mission. When thinking about this, think in terms of the three main areas: service to others, knowledge and use of the Bible, and personal growth. These areas encompass service to others in your small group community, discipleship, evangelism, prayer life, dependence on God in trials and difficulties, giving of money, and how to work with the Lord on sin issues and areas of weakness. Write statements such as, “I would like to know more of the Bible and be able to refer to it from memory; I would like to be a more patient person; etc.”

3. Think about other desires you have for your life – career, financial, family. Sometimes there’s conflict between spiritual goals and other types of goals. Remember, holding a job, earning an income, and having a family all fit within God’s will. In fact, the Bible has much to say about the value of each of these, but all in terms of how they fit under the umbrella of commitment to Christ. Spell out your hopes in these other areas for five and ten years from now.

4. Now, for couples, come together and compare notes. Note what things are similar and what things are different. Especially talk about your mission statements. Checkmark the areas where some discussion needs to happen. A couple’s vision has to incorporate the hopes and aspirations of both sides, not one person passively going along with another’s vision. Shared vision will lead to the greatest good done in God’s plan, as you organize resources and direct energy toward a common mission and goals.

5. For singles, get together with another single and discuss what you came up with. This exercise is important in helping you determine your life direction. The Bible is clear that singleness is a gift, not a liability. However, if God should bring someone into your life, this exercise will help you know if that person is on the same page with you. And, once you’ve sorted things out about God’s purpose for you, you can begin praying God will bring someone of like mind along. You might meet a great Christian single, but if he/she is committed to inner city ministry while you see yourself heading for Southeast Asia as a missionary, you might not be suited for each other.

So now you have a mission statement for your life. That’s wonderful. What kind of vision do you have? This will affect the decisions you make as they relate to the rest of this chapter.

Rita and Alex

Let’s consider the example of Rita. She’s decided that her mission has to do with kids and being used in the lives of children as a teacher and administrator. That’s the big picture. Right now, she’s sensing God’s pull toward leading the children’s program for her small to mid-sized congregation, which is a volunteer position, not paid.

How much time will this take? We’ll play this conservatively and imagine it will require four to six hours each Sunday. And let’s throw in some meetings at the church and phone calling to round up volunteers plus planning for special kids’ events. We’ll estimate it takes another fifteen to twenty hours during the week. This will fluctuate depending on time of year, but in general this should work.

Obviously, with that kind of commitment during the week, something will have to change. As Rita pushes forward on this endeavor, she notices this commitment eats up quite a bit of family time. Maybe she needs to look at altering her job or making adjustments to other volunteer opportunities.

Presently Rita works forty to fifty hours a week as a loan officer. She likes her job. She likes helping young people get their first home loan, or helping a financially strapped family get a consolidation loan. Her job gives her contact with different people in the community, and while she sees God pulling her more toward youth work, she senses from the Spirit a value in having this larger connection to her area. She’s actually worked with individuals who come to her church and had the opportunity to tell other customers about her faith.

So what should she do? Rita could look into going part-time at her job, even though that will cut her chances at a supervisor’s spot in the future. Perhaps she could job share with someone else. If she’s in a place where she can rely on benefits from her husband, perhaps she could offer that as a carrot to her employer.

So instead of the forty-five to fifty-five hours she now clocks, she could work an almost-full-time job of thirty to thirty-five hours a week. Or Maybe Rita could rearrange her hours, from nine hours, five days a week, to ten on three days and five hours on two days.

When it comes to God the options are dizzying. But it starts with prayerfully, studiously, humbly seeking His leading about your mission and the vision he’s directing you to pursue. You need to ask him sincerely what your life should be about. You should pray about that for the next seven days. And if you’re still not clear, pray another seven days. You should talk about your efforts to scope out a mission and vision with another believer who’s trying earnestly to follow Jesus. That should be followed by asking for their prayer-fed and Spirit-guided understanding and perceptions about who you are now and what you should be about.

The many ways this can play out are as vast as the thoughts of God. But it starts with the mission. Let’s consider Alex. He may land on the fact God wants him to spend more time building relationships with people at work. He determines, through prayer and counsel

from his wife and believing friends, that eating in the lunchroom is one way to get that done. He asks God to prompt him about which co-workers to eat with. Alex also decides to join the company softball team. He sees the team as a way to spend time with co-workers in a more relaxed setting where casual conversation might happen. Now, what has Alex done with his current job? Not much, except rearrange the current schedule so he’s more available to God’s purposes.

Options, options, options

What kind of things might you do to fulfill God’s plan for your life? Here are a few possibilities:

1. Volunteer at work. You may sense God wanting you involved with co-workers more, as cited above, but that you need to get out of your cubicle and serve. So maybe you sign up to be on the blood drive committee. Or agree to coordinate the annual holiday party. Or sign up for the corporate team that’s participating in your town’s business Olympics, featuring such renowned athletic challenges as the egg toss, the three-legged race and the tug-o-war.

Volunteering for anything will set you apart anyway. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that around three in ten Americans volunteered in 2005, numbers that had remained unchanged from the previous two years. Doing unpaid work for the sake of a good cause, at work or elsewhere, earns respect in the eyes of co-workers, neighbors, fellow soccer moms, and classmates, as long as you approach it with modesty and sincerity (see Philippians 2:3–4). Volunteering is only a logical response to God’s many gifts to us.

2. Work at a company because of ministry or the chance to make relationships, rather than the measure of my paycheck. Zach could very well make more money somewhere else. But, because he’s given God his career, he now sees that where he’s employed is the right work to do, even though he could earn a better paycheck at a different company.

But Zach has determined he should be where he is because of Andy, who he’s been friends with but who has just recently taken an interest in spiritual things. Zach and Andy have begun studying the Bible once a week at lunch, and they end up talking about Jesus and faith in God during coffee breaks. God also seems to be generating curiosity in Al, who works in another department, but whom Zach sees in the lunchroom. So, till further notice, Zach is not going anywhere, because his present job has him laboring beside some folks who are responding to God.

As a job seeker, you will most likely not have the tangible reasons listed above for wanting to work somewhere. You may be re-entering the job market or seeking that first job. You will need to research the companies in your field, but with a God track in mind as well as a career track. What companies have policies that permit workers to hold Bible studies or prayer times during lunch? Which business offers the most schedule flexibility so you can still help out with that inner city after-school tutoring program? Or coach your daughter’s soccer team? My decisions should be based on opportunity for spiritual revenue more than net take-home.

3. Work at a job because it allows me to be more available outside work. After working through the mission and vision exercise, let’s say you’ve decided you want to help lead a home group Bible study that will be the starting place for other similar groups. Your current employer expects you to work on weekends, when the group would meet. But you’ve heard of a position at another company, which offers more scheduling options. You have a friend who works there who’s also leading home Bible studies and he affirms this other company is very adaptable as long as you work hard and meet expectations when you’re there. You leave your old employer, even though it offers greater “growth” possibilities for your career, and take the job at the other place. Misguided? From the world’s view, yes, most certainly. From God’s? Look at Matthew 19 for a second:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. (Matthew 19:29–30, NIV)

In this regard, God isn’t even asking me to leave my house or family. But he is asking for my “field.” In a first century, agrarian context the “field” represented a primary means for making a living. Will I leave my field for the fields of God?

4. Choose a vocation for the sake of God’s call over prestige. Some have chosen careers that are low prestige in the eyes of society, or at least their peers, because God wants them to serve a certain community or use their skills with a certain population. In some cases he may use their experience to prepare them for other kinds of service.

My friend Lynne has a son Josh. Josh intends to use his newly minted medical degree and do something really wild: become a missionary doctor. What kind of money will he make? Very little in comparison with the average U.S. salary. But this is his dream, his calling, and his path.

I worked for a while at a chain of community newspapers. I started out as a beat writer for the New Carlisle Sun, a weekly publication for a network of small towns and farming communities north of Dayton, Ohio. I liked the New Carlisle Sun. I took photos

of kids; I wrote stories about science fairs and school board meetings; I got to know the people. I worked there for one and a half years and remember people asking me, “So, when are you moving on?”

I don’t have a problem with moving on. There’s a time for that. But I felt like God had placed me there for a time. Perhaps it was too long in the eyes of some. But there was a landmark moment in my experience there. During my stint in New Carlisle I was contacted about a job at a small daily paper. It was a step up, a way to put a little zing in my career. But I struggled with the decision, even though I wasn’t sure why. I even panicked about it one night, breaking out in cold sweats and breathing rapidly like the churning of a locomotive’s wheels. I called a doctor fearing a heart attack. The nurse on the other end encouraged me to breathe into a brown paper bag. I slowly regained composure and developed a renewed respect for lunch sacks.

In the midst of this decision-making dilemma, God gave me a word. I’ve never understood very well this idea that God would give someone a “word of knowledge” as I’ve heard it called. But I think that’s what happened. And that word was … blastus! Yes, blastus. What or who or why is a blastus? I didn’t know either. This word kept echoing in my head, like an annoying song you can’t forget. I decided to look it up in the Bible. Hey, there was a guy named Blastus in the New Testament. Fantastic! He was an aide to King Herod, listed in Acts 12. Right before Herod’s guts burst open. All right, interesting . . .  kind of gross . . . not sure what it has to do with journalism, but okay.

Then I felt the Spirit saying, “Look at the dictionary.” So I did. And there it was again, this crazy, meaningless sound that had been pinging like a distress beacon in my head for a week. And I learned that I had spelled it wrong. It was blastos not blastus. I learned it was a Greek word, meaning germ or sprout. And there you go. God was telling me I was a germ. Whoa!

I settled on the sprout idea. And here’s the interpretation the Lord provided: at that point in my writing career I was merely a sprout. My job at the Sun was allowing me to grow in a safe, secure environment and I shouldn’t try to push that along too quickly by transplanting myself to another paper. So I stayed at the Sun and in the sun, with the Son. Eventually I did transplant, but after I had become something a little hardier than a sprout.

God may want me to stay somewhere because he’s grooming me for something else even though a career counselor might say, “Go for it!” I should be willing to wait and serve him patiently where I’m at. In this respect, the parable of the talents applies: “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness! (Matthew 25:21, 23, NIV)

5. Go to work for myself. Some have concluded this is God’s course for their lives, so they might be available to him in some greater way with their time and energy. These are people who may or may not have an entrepreneurial bone or muscle in them. But they’re stepping out into a whole new world of endeavor out of a desire to know and love Christ better.

6. Give up my income. Maybe I can do just fine on the income of my spouse and God wants me to do some other things instead of make money at a job. He still has work for me to do, but not the kind that will earn remuneration.

My friend Betty Carano is an excellent example. About a year or so ago she did the math and concluded she could “retire.” We’re not talking the kind of retirement that would allow her a cottage near the beach either. This would be a very humble retirement. But her decision to leave the work world was driven by a number of very good spiritual indicators: by retiring she could be more involved in the lives of her grandchildren; she could join hobby and special interest groups in our community that would give her greater contact with spiritually searching people; she could be more available for small group Bible study, teaching, and discipleship; and she could volunteer at a local hospital.

Can you tell that Betty hasn’t really “retired,” but has instead “retooled”? “I’m more satisfied now than I ever was in my career,” Betty explained. “We serve a great God and I have the best job in the world!” All of these, and many more, are options that God may offer for your evaluation. Some of these will be explored in greater detail in the next section. Others have received treatment elsewhere in the book. There are other possibilities which only you will find as you obey Jesus’ command to “Go!” So let’s go!