Made For It
This blog forms part of a Restore Ministries series discussing the category of self-care in the light of scripture. Please ensure you read and watch these materials in context with the rest of the series on self-care as this discussion is much larger than any particular video or blog. At Restore Ministries we are passionate about equipping and supporting you for long-term fruitful and sustainable life and ministry.
“They are made for that.”
Ever thought this?
If you have then you were probably watching someone in their element doing something which came naturally. Who they were and what they were doing were well matched. Ever felt this way? Ever thought, “This is what I was made for.”
Doing life and ministry over the long term, isn’t just about rest and healthy self-denial, it’s also about finding a match between who God made you to be and the good works you engage in (Ephesians 2:10). Good alignment leads to increased capacity and fruitfulness, and misalignment leads to reduced capacity and often burnout.
I worked as a secondary school teacher for the first twenty years of my adult life. Over that time I got to work with thousands of high school students. I taught the quiet ones, the loud ones, those who thought they were funny and were, and those who thought they were funny and weren’t. I taught the extroverts, the introverts, those who struggled with life, and those who cruised through. While I enjoyed teaching almost every student, there were some I found particularly entertaining. I called them the extroverted extroverts. They loved to talk, make jokes and be the life of the party. But unlike standard extroverts, this lot didn’t draw energy from the crowd. They didn’t even need a crowd because they were their own crowd! They acted the same in front of 100 as they did when they were on their own. Their internal momentum was impressive.
It was almost impossible to keep these extroverted extroverts quiet. While their tendency to talk was a real handful for many teachers, it didn’t bother me much because I was a woodwork teacher and there was plenty of room for informal conversations. My subject was a reprieve for them, a space where they could be themselves a little more. Whilst other teachers wrestled with their talkativeness, I never really saw it as a negative thing. To me, it was a gift, a talent. [1] They were good at talking and I would regularly take the opportunity to remind them of their talent in cheeky ways. One of my favourites was this line, “You will need to find a job where you get paid to talk.” While it sounds like a backhanded compliment, it was never intended as an insult, and it was never taken as one. They would quickly and wholeheartedly agree with me. They knew they needed to enter a profession which matched who they were. Working quietly, day in day out, in an office cubicle would kill them - they weren’t made to do that.
Have you ever found yourself in the wrong place doing the wrong thing for an extended period of time? Ever felt like a square peg in a round hole? It’s a killer.
Maybe it happened at school. You were never good at Maths or English or _____, but your parents/the teachers made you do it. You did your best and you worked hard, but over time the initial uptick in your grades was followed by a long-term downward trend. You began to get frustrated. It wasn’t your thing. You weren’t an artist, or a drama person, or a literary nut. Eventually your grades suffered, your confidence suffered, and your struggle with one or two subjects bled into others.
Operating outside of your sweet spot can negatively affect other things you are good at.
Or maybe your experience of being in the wrong place doing the wrong thing happened at work. You took the job because you needed one. You knew it wasn’t in your sweet spot, but you told yourself you just had to put up with it - and you did for a time. But after a while it began eating away at you. You just weren’t a numbers person, or an organisational freak, or even a people person. You knew it wasn’t you, but you were stuck, and eventually it got to you. Before long you realised you were a fish out of water.
Operating consistently outside of your sweet spot will eventually wear you down. If you persist long enough, work hard enough, and don’t do it well enough for long enough (either your expectation or others), then running out of steam is inevitable. As you double and redouble your efforts to make it work, your failure will talk to you and tell you things which are not true.
“You can’t do anything. You are a failure. You have no skills.”
These falsehoods aren’t about who you are as a person, they are the fruit of trying to press a square block into a round hole. There is nothing wrong with the block or the hole, they just weren’t made to go together.
I am a drummer, not a singer or a dancer. No one has ever asked to see me dance or hear me sing. And there is a good reason for it – I can’t sing or dance. Now at this point you might be thinking, “Sure thing Peter. You may not be very good now, but you could improve at singing or dancing by getting some training.” And you would be right. I could improve a little. But here is the hard reality, I don’t want to be good at singing or dancing and I don’t think there is much room for improvement. I am just not interested. To focus on these two areas at the expense of things I am more naturally suited to, would probably be the end of me (and a lot of innocent people😊). It just wouldn’t work.
For some of us, COVID and the associated lockdown has uncovered a mismatch between who we are and what we are doing. We have realised what we are doing is not really ‘us.’ This dynamic was reported on recently in a news article which suggested 30% of workers are considering career changes. There is a cultural recalibration going on. Many of us are seeing the mismatch between who we are and what we are doing, and we are beginning to make some significant changes.
The pandemic of 2020 has provided us the opportunity for a realignment between who God made us to be and what he is calling us to do.
Your longevity and fruitfulness is connected to how well your giftings and passions are matched to the good works you do. A good match will result in increased capacity, energy, fruitfulness and fulfillment, and an ill-fitting match will lead to the erosion of capacity, energy, fruitfulness and fulfilment. Mismatches between ability and activity will eventually accelerate you towards burnout.
How can you know when there is a match between who God made you to be and what you are doing? Here are three key principles to get you started:
1. What are you gifted at?
Think about education and experience. What can you do? What do you know you can do? Where are you skilful? God has created everyone with unique skills and abilities. What are yours? If you are not sure, ask some people around you what they think. I remember a time when a volunteer at my church used a string line to set up chairs. It blew my mind. I had never seen it before, and I have never seen it since – but I loved it. He was excellent at setting up chairs and he took the time to do it well. I am still talking about it.
2. What are you passionate about?
Another way of asking this question is, “What are you willing to sacrifice your own time to be good at?” When I first began preaching, I didn’t get paid and it didn’t matter. I loved it and wanted to be good at it, so I was prepared to put in whatever time was required to learn my craft. It hasn’t changed much. I get paid now, but I do lots of work over and above my paid hours because I am passionate about what I am doing.
3. What things do you do which help others?
I believe the context of God’s family is one of the central ways God has designed for us to know who we are and what we are supposed to be doing (1 Corinthians 12). Surveys are helpful, but they don’t always give us the richness of information we can get from our spiritual brothers and sisters. One of the best ways to find out what you should be doing is to have a crack at something you are skilled at and passionate about, then get some feedback on whether it helped anyone. If it did, then you might be on a winner.
I want to close with a caveat: Don’t expect to be able to operate in your sweet spot all of the time. Almost every role you undertake will involve tasks which are not in your sweet spot. This is unavoidable. So, rather than embarking on an endless quest for the perfect ministry or career, make it your goal over the long term to be moving closer and closer to your sweet spot, to the way you have been made.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10
[1] While I would normally maintain a distinction between gifts and talents (gifts - given by the Spirit for the service of the church, talents - created abilities) I am using them synonymously in this article.