This past Sunday as we talked about the key ingredient of “vision” for our families we saw from Genesis how God’s vision for human beings needs to get inside us and become our own.

I found this article, which is available for download online, searching “finding your child’s calling”. I thought it had some very helpful insight I wanted to pass along:

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Discover Your Child’s Calling

by Jayna Petterson

“I’ve had it!” My dad blew up in resignation after the home buyer’s financing went sour. “I’ve spent all month nursing this deal and then the mortgage broker chokes it for me. How am I going to tell my buyers?” He reeled at the thought of confrontation and became agitated, mentally rehearsing any other move he could make to salvage this sale. He was out of his game. Even the satisfaction of winning “Realtor of the Year,” earning over one hundred thousand dollars a year and parking his first brand new car in our garage, was eclipsed by his stress in a job that forced him into the wrong mold. He was over fifty when he finally decided to inventory his strongest skills, gifts, and passions and make a drastic life change. Ultimately, my parents sold their ocean-view home and car, bought an RV, and now thrive on traveling and doing volunteer construction projects for Christian camps, churches, and outreach ministries. My dad’s joy has returned, and he beams with enthusiasm recounting the numerous practical ways he has touched others’ lives.

One of my greatest fears as a homeschooling parent is not fully equipping my children for their unique life calling and watching them go through an aimless wilderness experience like my father’s, robbing years of fruitful ministry time from their lives. I wrestle daily to strike a balance between my academic “gap-o-phobia” and a homeschool tailored to meet the specific, targeted knowledge and skills needed to fulfill my children’s life purposes. While it seems counterintuitive to focus on less rather than on more, this targeted strategy has, in fact, proven to be more effective. In Gallup’s thirty-year research project of individually interviewing over two million people, they discovered that “once a person has an area of competency . . . [it] provides a framework for acquiring new knowledge and understanding. A lot of knowledge about one subject offers the integrating point for all other knowledge. Strengths develop best when sufficient time is devoted to a single subject or goal” (Soar With Your Strengths, Clifton).

So instead of searching for curriculum that best covers every core subject, let’s start with identifying ten clues to your child’s calling. You can then use these clues as the unifying center for all other knowledge, allowing your child to develop a single area of expertise in depth.

Evaluate Past Playtimes

As a child, I used to spend hours sorting hundreds of pennies from my dad’s penny jug into chronological piles by date. There was no purpose to my fascination with meticulously organizing them other than the satisfaction of completing the task perfectly and putting them in the right sequence. As an adult, I still love to organize and administrate by writing my own curriculum in a very systematic, sequential, and obsessively thorough way. Could it be that these traits were intentionally built into me from my earliest years, incubating for God’s ultimate purposes?

Ephesians 2:10 states, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (NASB), showing that God does have an intentional plan for each one of us. What were some of your children’s favorite play themes that captivated their attention in their earliest years? Did they have any unusual pastimes? One mother told me about her son who drew constantly and loved to play with dolls for hours. He is now a book illustrator and a children’s pastor. Keep an open eye for clues to your children’s potential life callings from memories of their earliest free play.

Pinpoint Personality Preferences

Personality traits are the inborn, preferred style with which your child uses his or her abilities. Fortunately, God knew us before birth and uniquely designed each one of our personalities to complement the gifts and abilities He chose to give us.

Psalm 139 declares:

For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. . . . My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them. (Psalm 139:13, 15-16, NASB)

Is your child an extrovert or introvert, detail-oriented or imaginative, a thinker or feeler, routine or spontaneous? Try giving your child a personality profile such as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Online. Paying close attention to your child’s personality prevents an outgoing child from seeking an isolating career field or an introvert from becoming overwhelmed in an environment of social chaos. By analyzing the work-related environment and activities of a potential calling, you can easily avoid any glaring personality mismatches that might bring frustration in your child’s future.

Sift Strengths

“Your calling is what God wants you to do with your life; your talents and strengths determine how you will get it done. When you discover your talents, you begin to discover your calling” (Living Your Strengths, Winseman). For each child, think through his or her greatest areas of strength, perhaps abilities that others have commented on. What does your child do better than most other children his or her age? Is your child artistic or athletic? Mechanical or musical? Dramatic or detailed? Donald Clifton, credited as being the father of strengths psychology, developed the Strengths’ Theory, a strategy for increasing productivity and performance by focusing on areas of strength rather than trying to improve areas of weakness. Clifton’s Strengths’ Theory “is based on the premise that every person can do one thing better than any other 10,000 people” (Clifton and Nelson). What one thing can each of your children do better than ten thousand other people? When you get that nailed down, you are onto discovering your child’s life calling.

Find Your Child’s Favorite Skills

Skills are the building blocks of strengths, specific steps to accomplishing a bigger goal. Maybe your children are musical (strength), but do they use their sense of rhythm, sight-reading ability, or intuitive chording (all separate skills) to play the piano? Which skill category does your child most enjoy—working with people, things, or information and ideas? In Richard Bolles’s best-selling book for career changers,What Color Is

Your Parachute?, he first advises job-hunters to identify their ten favorite skills. This same exercise could be done with your children by recalling five to seven past accomplishments that they felt most proud about and then identifying the specific skills used to complete each task. Bolles then advises to prioritize each skill and look for those used repeatedly in several activities, explaining that “What you are looking for is patterns—transferable skills that keep reappearing. . . .” You might even repeat this process every few years until your child’s favorite skills are well-developed, because he will continually gain new skills with successive experiences. You can then better steer your children toward activities, pursuits, ministries, and vocations that make use of these particular skills, knowing that your children will naturally have greater enthusiasm for an activity if it uses their favorite skills.

Live Within Limitations

Just as the apostle Paul was kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the Word in the province of Asia (Acts 16:6-7), so too, God might be gently guiding your child’s path by putting up barriers to certain pursuits. In Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer says, “Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials.” Again, Palmer recounts the advice of an insightful Quaker woman who suggested to him that the “way closes behind you,” when he said, “Ruth taught me there is as much guidance in [the] way that closes behind us as there is in [the] way that opens ahead of us. The opening may reveal our potentials while the closing may reveal our limits. . . .” Try asking yourself if the limitation or barrier your child is facing is something that could build character by pushing through or if this is God giving a definite “no” to redirect your child into something else.

Jayna Pettersen homeschools her four uniquely gifted children. She holds a B.A. in psychology from Simpson University and teacher certification from the University of Washington. She develops curriculum and teaches CultivateYour Calling and Deliberate Discipleship to homeschooled students in Tacoma, Washington. At her church, she also teaches SHAPE, a ministry profiling workshop. Her forthcoming book, Cultivate Your Child’s Calling, further details how to identify and intentionally pursue your child’s potential calling. Visit Jayna’s website at www.cultivateyourcalling.com for information on her workshops and tips on what you could do today to prepare your child for his life calling.

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Check out Jayna Patterson’s Website.

And, when those times strike me, I often sense the inevitable nudge from the Holy Spirit that says:  “Build on this.  Take it deeper.  Fan the flame”.

Extravagant Worship
So, as we begin a new ministry season this Fall, that’s where we’re going to start. . . extravagant worship.   It’s a fundamental part of what God has called us to at BTCC.  This coming Sunday we will launch a series called “Worship Is. . . ” where the goal will be to get into our Bibles and deepen our understanding of what is going on when we sing, play, shout and praise as a church.  But, not only that, we will explore how worship is supposed to be so much more than singing and playing.  Worship has expression outside our walls.  The goal will be to come to a whole new place of understanding and passion for what we are called to do.

You can play a critical part.
Leading up to it, I would like to invite everyone to be in prayer — asking, expecting, believing that God will bring refreshing and a whole new passion for loving Him and truly representing Him in the world.

See you Sunday.

The challenge to go out in the community and “do something” was reinforced by goal number four.

It is a faith-building blast to find myself in very serious discussions about opening our church in Washington Square Mall.  Our trustees gathered last night to discuss it again.  The consensus has been that the idea makes sense.  Beginning years ago, I remember asking God to do a work in our church where something like Washington Square Mall made sense.  That’s what I am still praying.   And, honestly, my prayer has been that we, as a church would grow so much, moving to the mall was and obvious,  matter of fact solution.  All that seems to be happening now.  It’s fun to watch a prayer enter the “seen” realm.

However, I feel the constant reminder all around me to make sure life doesn’t become about a building, or worse, that we don’t wait for a building to start doing what we’re really supposed to do.  It’s easy to fall into an “if only. . . then” mentality.   “If we only had that building THEN- we could really accomplish great things… “.  That’s a mistake.  God can use us and DOES use us – right NOW.  Our current facility is far nicer than many, many churches have ever thought about having.  I watched amazing, “dreams come true” type stuff happen just this past Sunday.

That’s why, mall or no mall, we have to make sure we stay on the course.   Part of the course continues to be: Process.  As a church, we have an assignment known as the Great Commission:  Go, make, baptize, teach. . . etc.  We are currently in the process of asking ourselves:  what if we were sent to this community to plant a church and fulfill the Great Commission from somewhere else?  What would we do?  How would we reach out with
 intentional effort?

That has to be our mentality in discussing the Mall.  The Mall is all about the mission.  The missional process starts with getting to know the place we’re in –then, finding out what need God would have us meet.  After that, we invite them in, love them, make the case to them and make disciples.

We’re currently in survey and study time.  Please take it seriously and ask your unchurched friend, neighbor, co-worker, whoever you can talk to tell you what they think about why people don’t go to church and what people’s needs are.  The more I do it the more my heart aches with a purpose to reach people, not just buy a mall.  I find myself gaining clarity about what really matters.  God’s glory matters, intentionally obeying the Great Commission matters.  The Mall needs to rise up out of our pursuit of those things.