Do what you're made to do.
Posted by Mark Stephan
If you’ve been reading my blogs, or know me, you probably know my back story. I was a Christian worker in Turkey for 7 years, returned to the US when the Lord called me back, and spent a year forcing myself to do ‘nothing’ because the Lord told me to just ‘be’, not plan to return to Turkey, not plan to stay, just be in Him and be satisfied in it.
It was hard doing this, as anyone who knows me, knows I’m not a ‘being’ type of person. I do things. But I did it, and after a year of just ‘being’ I was released from that period on August 3rd 2009. On that day I starting asking the Lord what does He have for me. I can say that if I thought the past year was hard in doing nothing, it is even harder now, because I feel released to do ministry, to answer his call, and yet, the roadblocks are there and it’s amazingly frustrating.
I try to be an honest guy, and let others know how I feel. I think this helps people realize Christians are not perfect. It also helps people understand how God works in my life, and thus the Lord can be glorified in the successes He puts in my life, the struggles He puts in my life, and the failures that I cause myself.
Since August I can frankly say I’ve been, and am still, in what I can only call a mucky depression. Previous to that time for a year every cell in my body yelled out to do nothing, and eventually my mind succumbed and I learned not to plan for tomorrow. But now, ever since August, when I have renewed my prayers to the Lord as to what is next, every cell in my body has been screaming ministry. Ministry in a way that is very different than what I’ve been doing in the past. In the past I ran a BAM (Business As Mission) company. While I don’t feel the call to end it completely, I do feel the call to not make it the main activity of my life, to make it less and to draw in closer to vocational ministry. Through BAM I served the Lord through business, but now the call is very different. The call is to serve the Lord in a tight-knit community of others drawing near to the Lord through vocational full-time service.
This is where the sense of lost fulfillment is. Every avenue of vocational ministry has been blocked. It’s frankly strange. The Lord is calling me to vocational ministry, even has driven me to apply to do stuff I wouldn’t had considered before, but I applied, and got denied. Wow, what does that mean? I’ve spent a couple of months just rolling that around in my head. I still cannot grasp it. In everything I feel called to pushed away and redirected to things I don’t feel one iota of calling to. The end result is a feeling of being torn, frustrations, and ultimately sadness. Sadness of not being able to do what I was made for.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not going around sulking. But frankly, I do feel it. To steal a quote from Tolkein in the Lord of the Rings, where Bilbo Baggins says he feels like butter that’s been spread over too much toast. I just feel dried up in what I’m doing, that the blessing, that is measurable only in the joy of the work, has dried up. I can do what I do, and do it well, but the joy is gone. It has been removed.
I have no solutions… I’m stagnant. I’ve not even been able to blog about it, tweet about it, nothing. I feel bottled up. For some reason today I was able to write this. Perhaps we’re at a turning point, perhaps not.
The good news is that God knows how I feel, and He cares! I don’t know the Lord’s timing, but I do know the plan. All of heaven is suspended like me in expectation of what will come, they groan for the fulfillment of the Lord’s promises to be.
Like heaven, I groan.