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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Yesterday I was out exploring back roads with my son.  We passed an old cemetery and decided to stop.  The sign said it was established in 1861.  We found the burial plot of a Civil War soldier and someone who (according to their head stone) had been born a slave, sold away from his mother at the age of one.  It was one of those moments that was filled with interest, reflection, wonder and a tremendous heart call to breathe in the air I have right now because it won’t always be there.

Between that and studying Ecclesiastes, I was reminded again:  this is my one and only life and it’s going to end.  Yeah, that’s kind of depressing.  But, nevertheless, true.  All of those people  with names marked on stones were just as real and full of life as you and I at one time. The end of their lives on this earth felt as distant to them when they were living as it does to us now.  Now, they are simple names, a couple of dates in a forgotten plot of ground in the back roads of Southern Indiana.  I left with an urgency to simply make sure I was living, not just going through motions and honestly, I started worrying about it. Was I doing what mattered?  Am I really drinking in those I love?  Am I giving enough?

Then, today, I visited an elderly woman who is in ICU.  Things could go either way in her situation. I read to her  what I often read at bed sides:  “so we fix our eyes, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”  I need to remember the limits of the vision of the writer of Ecclesiastes. He is as right as he can be about life on this earth:  It’s a vapor folks, get used to the idea.  Don’t act like you have time to spare and waste.  On the other hand – I can have urgency without worry.  I can know what matters and those eternal things can be lived in the simplest ways:  prayers, kind words,  loving actions.  It doesn’t have to be complicated and grandiose.  TODAY, you and I can live lives of vibrant  but peaceful urgency.  All we have to do is remember, life on this earth is temporary BUT, we have a promised eternity to keep our eyes on.