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.

Worship is:

(There are not definitions but principles surrounding it)

Deciding – not feeling  

Celebrating – reverence can be expressed in shouts, dancing, instruments, enthusiasm.

Obeying – Reverence is truly expressed in doing things the way God says to do them

Responding – worship is a recognition and an acknowledgment that God has done something

Learning – It is critical to understand that the first part of the story has a mistake and the second half of the story is a correction.

Consecrating – in Christ we are the new Priesthood with the call to connect to God and help others connect to God

Organized, Skillful Playing and Singing – The priority and purpose of music — both instrumental and vocal is unmistakable and compelling.

Rejoicing –the closer one approaches the presence of God the more joy there is. Joy is ours because He lives.

Meeting – God calls crowds. We experience things in a crowd we don’t on our own or in small groups. We should dedicate ourselves to meeting together.

Loving – the Bible says a simple thing: if you claim to live God and hate your brother you are a LIAR! Very strong but tied to the principle that our relationships with people are inextricably tied our relationship with God. We can’t disconnect the two.

Who are you going to intentionally express love and care to this week?

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.

True Biblical Community:

Is inspired by MERCY

Thrives on HUMILITY

Sober judgment – Interest in others

Gives others LIBERTY

Demands MATURITY

Is built INTENTIONALLY

The essence of other religious systems is DO

The essence of Christianity is DONE

Doing never equals DESERVING

Doing is RESPONDING

We are NOT righteous

Righteousness comes FROM God

Righteousness is received by FAITH

We have a new identity

A new relationship to sin  – we are no longer slaves to it

A new relationship to the Law  – we have died to it

A new power to live  – we have gone from a convict before a judge to a child in the household

Romans
1:17 = Summary statement of whole book

UNDERSTANDING ROMANS
1) We are not righteous

Chapter 1 is an indictment on the human race
18 – 25, 28 – 32 who are THEY?  = US

3 groups of UNRIGHTEOUS PEOPLE
1. the highway to hell types – Easy Rider – tattoo = sinner. 1:24-32
2. the think they’re on the highway to heaven because they are NOT the highway to hell types – 2:1
3. those who are truly ARE on a highway to hell but think they’re on a highway to heaven because they follow a lot of religious rituals   2:21. 3:10 – ALL – different categories of sinners together

GOD JUDGES – 2:6 – God will give to each person according to what he has done
God judges FAIRLY – v. 12 – Those who sin apart from the law.
Hell  – everyone believes

God judges PURELY  and completely– v. 16

Heb 4:13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must Isaiah 64:6  “All of our righteous acts are like filthy rags” = lit.  menstrual cloth

Give account.
If you’re smart – the idea of that ought to scare you to death

2) RIGHTEOUSNESS IS FROM GOD
BUT NOW
Remember the summary statement in 1:17
In the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed.  A righteousness that is by faith from first to last, as it is written, the just will live by faith.

Romans 3:21 – 26 – the turning point
The form of the word translated justified has at its root the idea of righteousness
81 occurrences of the adjective form, 92 f the noun, 39 of the verb form, 5 of the adverb
Romans triangle

3 terms:  Atonement (Propitiation), Redemption, and Justification
3 = So HOW is a man made righteous?  From God BY

3) RIGHTEOUSNESS COMES THROUGH FAITH
Remember the summary statement FROM FIRST TO LAST
Works / faith = both ways of receiving things in life
THE CORE OF CHRISTIANITY  = GIFT
4:4 – 8

4) WE HAVE A NEW IDENTITY – 5:1 – 2
Mullet is a halfway move – that was then, this is now.  We NOW have.

During our “Fact or Fairytale?”  Series it was suggested we make notes available since there is a lot of material and a lot to think about. I hope you will continue to pursue your own encouragement and equipping as we all face a society which is extremely skeptical with a faith that is extremely defensible.  From our talk on Creation and Evolution:

How do we answer the challenge of evolution?
Romans 1:18-22

Understand
Understand Biblical Creation:

1. An artist made the art

The potter’s relationship to clay
God cares for His creation but is not dependent on it.
Transcendental realities – love, courage, compassion and justice are OUTSIDE.
Outside, not dependent, can affect it but chose to do it.
Can destroy it and not be diminished himself

2. The art reveals the artist.
You CAN look at the creation and see the unseen.
Suggested reading:
“A Meaningful World” by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathon Witt, (accompanying web site):  http://www.ameaningfulworld.com/ “Billions of Missing Links” and  “What Darwin Didn’t Know” both by Geoffrey Simmons.  “The Case for the Creator” by Lee Strobel, “The Evidential Power of Beauty” by Robert Moray,

3. The Art is broken and rebelling.  V. 21
CURSED IS THE GROUND/ SUBJECT TO FRUSTRATION
“although they knew God they neither glorified Him as God, nor gave thanks to Him.”
There is a loaded deck
“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit in this one complaint. . . the literalists [i.e., creationists] are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”– Dr. Michael Ruse, author, Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies
The suppression of truth  – the desire for independence
The basic idea is that we don’t WANT there to be a personal CREATOR

Understand evolution

1. It DOES happen. . . to a point

be fruitful and multiply  – implication that he began with a few.  Changes happen in the multiplying process.
This is called micro evolution, but does not apply to everything (called macro evolution) – this is the error scientists are making.
There are borders – DARWINS CONTEMPORARIES challenged it AS SCIENTISTS

2. It claims FULL ability

Where ALL of life came from and GOD IS NOT REQUIRED.  Here is no need to put God into the evolution process because it does not REQUIRE Him.
Limits of change / Systems – your body has to have everything working at the same time – how do you evolve a heart?

3. Discussion is not allowed
Any challenge to evolutionary theory is met with:  you are talking about religion not science.
Chapter in Origin of Species: ‘Difficulties With the Theory”

While many know my story about deliverance from the drug lifestyle,  I don’t think I have ever slowed down and taught (in depth) about what I learned and the process of how to be free.  I am reminded regularly of how epidemic the problem of substance abuse is. I have met SO MANY who struggle in that area.   So, over the next few weeks we’re going to set the subject on the table.

The preparation has been a fascinating journey for me. I walked through a lot of memories and asked myself a lot of questions.  But, most importantly, I am dedicated to trying my best to make sure we focus on God’s Word and let the answers rise out of studying it.  It was interesting to try to walk the balance between being autobiographical and purely biblical.   So, I looked back to find some of the most meaningful things from the Bible I learned through the time of walking away  from drugs.  I also have tried to develop a pattern of “owning” books on Sunday’s – so people can achieve some kind of understanding of individual books.  Putting those ideas together,  I decided to link it all to a look at the book of Ecclesiastes.  Read it.  It’s a trip (to use drug phraseology).  That book actually helped me tremendously in the early days of my walk and was fundamental to giving me a sense of truly never wanting to go back to the old way of doing things again.  For a time the old life looked appealing – now it doesn’t at all.  I would love to see God instill in all of us that His ways are not just right – but BEST, on every level.  I think Ecclesiastes, in all its weirdness, will do that.  So, even if drugs haven’t been your struggle, I’ll bet you’ll have a good time looking into one of the Bible’s most unusual books.

See you this Sunday.

At any rate, I remember the day now, waking up thinking more along the Richard Dawkins line – sometimes this stuff isn’t any fun.  Things were cloudy and gray in the soul.

Then I decided to crack open this strange, unpredictable, interesting, mystifying, lyrical,  artistic,  sexual, metaphor and simile packed, sensual book called “Song of Songs”  (meaning “greatest of songs”). It opens, “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. . .” and somehow the sunlight broke through the clouds  and the adventure started all over again. It renewed that sense of purity of first crossing the line of faith.

I’ll tell you why in the next post – and on this Sunday.