You Were Made for This
Meditating on the gifts that don't lead to greatness
I never really wanted to be a writer. There was one instance in elementary when I dreamed of writing a gripping page-turner about a young girl’s family life. Fourteen sentences later the Word document was abandoned.
As a kid, I worked my way through a lot of dreams: restaurant owner, chef, florist, accountant, graphic designer, business-woman. My eclectic futures were based less on what I enjoyed, and instead on what I thought looked cool, or what I thought I was supposed to do. In high school, people said I was smart, good at math, or good with computers—so I searched for the career that seemed to match closest. It wasn’t until I finished my first semester as a computer graphics major, and on my way to quit that my friends told me, “Yeah I didn’t really see you in those jobs either.”
Years later, once I was married and became a mother, I started to feel the pull to write. Each day I’d tell my husband while getting ready for bed, “You know, if I had a blog I’d write about…” One day I finally I threw out the if and got to writing.
It’s been twelve years now, and the greatest part of my writing journey has been noticing how it didn’t begin with the creation of my blog. Instead, it began in elementary school on the roof of our garden shed, where I’d climb up to sit and stare at the field and trees in the property behind our house. I’d listen to the geese call and sit praying and thinking in silence. My writing was kindled as I rambled solitarily through the woods near our neighborhood, imagining and thinking. It grew while I watched movies and unknowingly analyzed the story arcs. My mind grew comfortable with prolonged thought every hour I swam in the muffled quiet of the pool during high school swim practices.
I’m not sure I ever came up with great profundity, but in hindsight I can only marvel at the way my mind has always been thinking, observing, and trying to put words to what I think and feel. Now I can see clearly that it’s the way God made me. The Lord formed my mind to delight in analogies, symbolism, and the order of words. When he fashioned my body and knitted me together, he not only gave me brown hair and size 10 feet—he gave me a love of art and communication that I gravitated to even when I didn’t clearly understand that’s what was happening.
It’s easier to identify our passions in the bigger aspects of our lives. We might be a pastor, writer, engineer, or teacher, and we see God’s gentle hand leading us into the vocation that encompasses our working lives. But sometimes our passions wind into smaller ends. We write for fun, paint on the weekends, study birds, or work on models. My own passion for beauty and creativity extends into a handful of hobbies no one will see. These aren’t inconsequential. God still formed and nurtured these small passions, and we can take time to glory in his gifts.
We can delight in the way he wired us to notice the sounds of the birds’ call, or to gravitate towards a pair of bicycle wheels. We can ponder at how God carried our love of music from the ages of four to sixty-four, and marvel in the way he used that love throughout the different circumstances of our lives. God’s work is never small. It only seems that way to us because we won’t take the time to wonder before it.
How has God shaped your loves? I’m not talking about all the activities you think you should be doing. Though it’s tempting, we don’t want to be driven by aesthetics like I was in my own childish career aspirations asking: How can we impress? What looks good? Once we throw off this noise, we’ll find the gifts of our Maker. Maybe it will be in the pages of history books or with the structured order of a hook and yarn. It might be in eyes that have always tracked light and details that show up in your photographs. Thinking through these gifts allows us to trace the threads of our Maker’s craftsmanship and his gentle hand in our lives.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made—by the wonderful and fearful God who delights in all of our particular ways. We can marvel at how he made us and carried us—in the big, and especially in the small. Then we can go on and joyfully do what our Lord has fashioned us to love.