More: Find Your Personal Calling and Live Life to the Fullest Measure

by Todd Wilson

We know Peter’s impact downstream of that profound “yes,” but we often forget the years of struggle he may have experienced to prepare him for that day. The story behind the story (or before the story) is always critical.

The problem isn’t that we want too much—it’s that we want too little. Instead of experiencing an adventurous journey with God and gaining an ever-increasing clarity on who he made us to be, we become stuck in today. We fail to embrace and step into the story God has uniquely designed for us.

What about us? Do we have a sense of how critical our path might be to future generations? That our story will impact an entire generation of leaders in ways we simply cannot see today? The foundational idea we must begin with is to accept the truth that God has created us and has created our context, putting those two things together with a good result in mind.

He wants our obedience today in small steps based on what he does reveal. He calls us to be faithful with little, so that he can entrust us with much.

George Washington’s time as a surveyor was preparing him for something much bigger than he understood at the time. But if Washington had allowed surveying to be his final destination, he would have missed the greater purposes ordained for him.

The story God is writing in us isn’t something that we passively receive. The mystery is that God wants us to participate in this story in an active way.

First, the clarity I have (or don’t have) does not change the beauty and sovereignty of what is hidden behind the fog. I need to move forward trusting that the clarity will come and acting as if it already did.

The journey is not always easy in the fog, but we can make progress.

But clarity as it relates to decisions and progress is as related to trust as it is to understanding and seeing clearly.

Now consider the blind man with a seeing-eye dog. He doesn’t see at all but trusts the signals of his canine guide to let him step forward safely. Sometimes the clarity we experience allowing us to move forward is based on trust and limited input, instead of crystal-clear vision.

We must learn to distinguish between “God fog” and “self fog.” Sometimes God allows fog into our lives as part of his purposes, to teach us increased trust and patience or to protect us from moving too quickly. There are other times when the lack of clarity is on our end—“self fog”—and there are things we are doing (or not doing) that actually prolong or even worsen the fog.

The more quickly we embrace the truth that God cares more about our blind steps of faith and surrender than he does about our clarity and comfort, the sooner we will be positioned to more fully understand the story God has written in our lives.

you are a masterpiece conceived by God before the beginning of the world and placed perfectly in creation to accomplish a purpose that he has planned. Once we grasp this idea at a heart level, it changes our perspective and attitude. It also changes our persistence.

Do you really believe that God has uniquely gifted you and is writing an important story in your life?

How do we make progress when all we see is fog? Find the corner pieces—and we know where those go. No picture required. Find the edge pieces, and with a little time and work we are able to outline a frame for our mountainous view. No picture required. As we do, we discover that the pieces we’ve put in place solidify a living picture that is even better than the printed picture on a box. Momentum builds as pieces are put in place and clarity emerges.

We often won’t be able to take a solid step into a sharper picture until we engage. Things get clearer as we go.

Calling moves us from being paralyzed in our perceived insignificance to finding profound significance in our unique design, not because of what we do but because of who created us. Because of trust, we can embrace the fog, taking steps of faith and trust beyond what we can clearly see. As we do, we will learn which fog is self-inflicted and which is provided by God to protect us. This moves us from needing perfect clarity to instead living in loving trust of our heavenly Father.

We are all born with a form of separation anxiety. The quiet, persistent, often unrecognized gnawing of the pain of separation from our heavenly Father produces equally unhealthy behaviors in each of us.

Having lost our true identity, purpose, and place with the Father, we try desperately in all kinds of unhealthy ways to deal with the separation and its resulting anxiety and pain.

Will we live by a script that we try to write ourselves, trying to please ourselves and quell our own pain and anxiety? Or will we trust the script that God writes for us, and will we humbly and gratefully follow him?

The very longing designed as a beacon to call us to God and eternal relationship with him becomes misused as a drive and motivation for conquering and pursuing our own immortality and legacy.

Satan can hijack the good that is at the core of our deep longings for eternity and immortality. Without discipline and caution, we can make the object of our desires more important than the One who is the author of our longings.

Most desires have a scorecard only on this side of eternity and have little value in satisfying our eternal-based longings.

But what happens when you play a game you can never win? What happens when the fulfillment of a desire does not actually fulfill the deeper-rooted longing? What if it was impossible for you to ever be the king for more than a moment?

The wrong script will always produce the wrong results.

If we are not careful and deliberate, we will believe our own insatiable longings give us a reason to pursue unhealthy earthly desires. We will pursue desires rooted in the wrong kind of more: doing more, accomplishing more, earning more, working more, learning more, leading more, and influencing more. Yet we will never fully satisfy these desires, and trying to do so will make us exhausted and cynical. Chasing after these desires distracts us and hijacks us from the right kind of more, the life of abundance that God intends for us.

The surprising key is this: we must embrace the longing we feel.

the home our heart longs for is deeply felt now . . . but won’t be fully realized this side of eternity. This realization is a game changer.

A works-based approach fuels the narcissism and me-centered approach to pursuing our desires. It’s still king of the hill as we seek to claw and compete our way up to God.

We have to understand that Christianity is different and begins with God’s longing for us. And even when our relationship is hindered, God is the One who works for and searches for us. We see this picture over and over in Scripture.

We are created in his image, and our longing has its source in his longing. It really is like a homing device or magnet with a two-way attraction.

Eternal life is ours for the accepting, not the creating.

What would it mean to be called by God without the shackles of misplaced ambitions and desires that we know so well? What would it be like to truly live in the sweet spot we were created to live in?

Calling moves us from the captivity of the earthbound “kingship of me” to joy-filled living in the eternal kingdom of God.