I’m currently enrolled in graduate courses at my local university and am taking the second class of a two-part series on Entrepreneurship. As part of the first class, the instructor asked us individually what the state of our career was. While I am blessed to have a good, flexible, decent paying job, I have found myself after more than a decade working in the telecommunications business to be complacent professionally. With no real changes in job function, less than cost of living salary increases, and very little hope for advancement, the only thing keeping me in my current job is the people I work with and the flexibility I’ve come to rely on. When I was in engineering school in the late 90’s, my goals for the future were to be challenged intellectually, to advance in a strong, stable company, and to make lots of money. Isn’t that what our parents taught us we would gain from a college degree? Well, I have allowed myself somehow over the years to become content in what I made myself to believe is a “stable” working environment. Then after my company was bought out by an industry giant immediately the work environment changed and they slowly started taking away the things that made my job enjoyable and profitable, specifically some of the flexibility I had come to rely on. So, I decided that I needed to pursue my graduate degree to either embrace the new company and move up or make myself more marketable and move out. The instructor’s next question was “Are you successful?” My first thought was I’m able to help support my family so yes I’m successful. How do you define success? He defined success as “acting on your passion”.
So, now in the second class in the series, the instructor asks “Are you acting on your passion?” on your “calling” in life? Your calling is what you are uniquely gifted to do. How you want to serve others. Well, no my job does not involve my passion, it does not define me or what I‘m about. I’m just making a pay check so that I can enjoy other things in life. So then the question became “What is your passion?” As simple as it sounds, this was very difficult for me to answer. As a Christian, wife, and mother I immediately wanted to say God, my family, being healthy and happy. Other than those obvious things I had no idea what my passion is or what I’d rather be doing to make a living. So the instructor led us through an exercise to determine exactly what it is your passion is. He asked us to answer the following questions: What do you love to do? What do others ask you for help with? What do you choose to read about? What do you think about when you lay down at night? How do you spend your money? What did you want to do as a kid? Here are some of the things I came up with: I love to spend time with my husband and kids. Others ask me for advice about kid issues and computer support issues. I enjoy reading about successful people (celebrities, a real weakness for me). I think about ways to save money and my kids’ safety/health/growth/education. I spend my money on my kids and household bills (paycheck to paycheck unfortunately). As a kid I wanted to be a veterinarian or a robotics scientist working for NASA. Notice that none of these things involve electrical engineering in which I spent 7 years getting an undergraduate degree in.
Well, at the same time I was going through this exercise in class I was also going through a series with my women’s group at church (BTW, I love this time with other Christian women!) on Wednesday nights determining what our spiritual gifts are. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the Lord was trying to tell me that finding my passion and determining my spiritual gifts were totally connected and possibly one and the same.
Since this initial blog post is turning into a novel I’m going to cut right to the chase…
I determined that my first thought of what my passion is was dead on. My passion is God, my family, helping others and trying to find a happy healthy balance between family life, career (which allows me to not lose a little bit of myself), and living the life God has planned for us. This (OF COURSE) fell right in line with what I determined were some of my spiritual gifts which included mercy, helping, and knowledge. Hence, I came up with the idea of incorporating these desires into a blog that will hopefully be found helpful for some and as a learning tool for me and maybe eventually one day become profitable enough that I can leave the corporate world and have the FREEDOM to spend my time on the more important things in life all for the glory of God. So please join me as we discuss topics that today’s youth and women in general encounter and how we can use God’s word to find the right way to meet them head on.
