joy + need = sweet spot

SOOOOOO many thoughts running through my head today.  Had a great time reading about Rahab and the spies this morning, made homemade whole wheat pita chips in my quest to try some newer healthier habits (I'm sure you'll hear more about that another day!), went for a walk cause it is goooorrrgggeeeooouuusss here ...  and I had an opportunity to speak to a Women's Club ... this was a bonafide, cute little pillars of the community women women's club ... and it met at this amazing venue in Braselton, the Braselton-Stover House ... you know, one of those places that would be grand for a wedding one day ... and I got to go there!  Wanna see it ... doesn't really do it justice.  But you get the idea!! 

Gavin's Mom and her friend, Martha Lyn are members of this "women's club" (really didn't know these things existed outside of Steel Magnolias ... but they do ... and there was even a Miss Daisy ... just need Morgan Freeman to show up and the picture is complete!).  Back around Thanksgiving, Gavin and I were at his parents ... along with Ed and Martha Lyn and a bunch of other family.  Somehow Fay and Martha Lyn decided I needed to be the speaker for their women's club in February.  I agreed ... and then it happened today.  They wanted me to talk about the mission trips I take with students ... so I brought my pictures and my stories ... but I also realized that most of them weren't going to be as passionate about medical missions as I am!  And you know what, that's ok.  I'm not as passionate about gardening or art museums as some of them.  So, I wanted to talk about something a little bigger than just medical missions.  This is kind of what I was thinking ... and shared with them.

Frederick Buechner said,

"Your calling is that place where your true joy and the world's great need meet."

One of my all-time favorite quotes.  One of the platforms for my top five biggest soapboxes!!!  I am a big proponent of the idea that God does not call us to do something we HATE! I have diligently been trying to convince my students of this! I had a conversation last year with a soon–to-graduate who was afraid of what her life would look like if she really surrendered to God’s call on her life … a mud hut in Africa, a pauper’s existence in America, never marrying, losing her passion … what a sad, sad commentary on our idea of God if we think that’s the future He has planned for us! We would NEVER say out loud that we think such things, but somewhere in our hearts we harbor that fear that God would never allow us to do something we love.  Yep, I've said it and if you search deep down in your heart, you've thought it a time of two. 

Now, I’m not stupid, God has called me to places that weren’t on my top 10 list of living. He has asked me to do things that were hard (ahem, 10 days in Modlova with no shower and 6 days in Nicaragua in a WET tent, and being stopped by the police (or was that KGB) in an unnamed country) and even hurtful … but at the root, He has never called me to do something I HATE because as I have learned to follow Him, His desires have become mine. And I can, then, have confidence in doing what brings me great joy because that very desire came from HIM!!!  (I know, I know, similar to my soapbox earlier this week!!)

We know this … but sometimes we forget … and sometimes that desire to live in our passion just gets buried under the stack of “must be dones.” I LOVE my job 90% of the time (I know, try not to tell) … there are just things that must be done and hours that must be worked that I don’t LOVE … I get so excited meeting with my small group leaders and hearing what God is doing in and through them. I can drone on and on about how much fun our women’s retreat was … but I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE my nurses and I will bore you for years with my tales of medical mission trips! They make me smile! They give me energy! I just float through those days when I am involved in ministry on the nursing campus! It doesn’t even seem like work. Same is true for all of us. It looks different, but we all have those things that we LOVE so much that we don’t even see them as work. Maybe it’s bike riding, maybe it’s teaching, maybe it’s photography or hiking or knitting or art or sewing or missions or reading to inner city kids, but we all have that sweet spot where our TRUE JOY and the WORLD’S GREAT NEED come together in something amazing!

Ken Gire says in Seeing What is Sacred that “to us has been given a song to sing. It isn’t important that we sing it professionally with great polish. It is important that we sing it passionately with great heart.”  I think it's time for some karaoke!!  :0)