You Have a Calling — and It’s More Specific Than You’ve Been Told

Based on Ephesians 2:10 — “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

For years I thought calling was something that happened to special people.

Apostles. Missionaries. Church planters. People with dramatic conversion stories and clear divine assignments written in fire across the sky. I had a general sense that God wanted me to love people and make disciples — but the specific, particular, irreplaceable you-shaped calling that the New Testament seems to describe? I wasn’t sure that was for ordinary believers like me.

Then I read Ephesians 2:10 — really read it — and something permanently shifted.

Paul uses an extraordinary word at the beginning of that verse.

Poiēma. We are God’s poiēma — His workmanship, His masterpiece, His crafted work. It’s the word from which we get “poem.” We are not mass-produced spiritual units rolling off a divine assembly line. We are individually, intentionally, artistically crafted — each one distinct, each one bearing the specific marks of a Creator who made us to carry something no one else can carry in quite the same way.

And the works prepared in advance — proetoimazō — literally “made ready before” — are not generic acts of Christian niceness available to any believer interchangeably. They are specific. They are your works. They were prepared with you in mind — your story, your wounds, your gifts, your particular combination of experience and passion and personality.

Your calling is not a job description. It is a divine fingerprint.

My own clarity about calling came slowly — and through sources I didn’t expect.

It came through a crying teenager on a farm who discovered that the questions he couldn’t stop asking were actually the shape of his calling. It came through years of house church experimentation in the Philippines that taught me what genuine discipleship looks like — and what it doesn’t. It came through the painful breaking open of a first marriage and the slow rebuilding of identity in its aftermath. It came through Japan, where Lois and I discovered that mission is rarely what you planned and almost always what God prepared.

And it came through a phrase that keeps rising in me every time the conversation about God goes somewhere real:

I wanna know more.

That insatiable hunger — for depth, for encounter, for the next room in the inexhaustible house of God’s nature — is not just a personality quirk. It is a calling marker. It is one of the specific ways God has shaped me to serve the people He is sending me to — people who are hungry for more than the surface level of institutional Christianity can offer, who are asking the same questions I was asking at 14, who need someone who has already walked the path to say: keep going, it gets deeper, there is so much more.

Bob Hamp argues that calling is always discovered in the intersection of three things:

What you are uniquely designed to do. What the world — or your particular corner of it — genuinely needs. And what brings you the kind of deep satisfaction that feels less like personal pleasure and more like rightness — the sense that you are doing exactly what you were made for.

“Your calling,” Hamp writes, “is not something you choose from a menu of spiritual options. It is something you discover by paying attention — to what breaks your heart, to what fires your imagination, to what you cannot stop thinking about no matter how hard you try. Those are not distractions from your calling. They are its fingerprints” (Think Differently, Live Differently, p. 189, Bob Hamp).

What breaks your heart. What fires your imagination. What you cannot stop thinking about.

For me, those three things have consistently pointed in the same direction — toward the transformation of ordinary believers from religious consumers into genuinely formed, Spirit-led, Christ-centered people who know who they are and know how to live from that knowledge every single day.

That is what Lifechoicely exists to serve.

Graham Cooke brings a dimension to calling that I find both clarifying and deeply encouraging.

He argues that your calling is not separate from your character formation — it is your character formation, expressed outward. God is not forming you in one direction and calling you in another. He is forming you into the precise shape of the person who can carry the precise calling He has prepared. The formation is the preparation. The breaking open is the equipping.

“God does not call the equipped,” Cooke writes, in what has become one of the most quoted phrases in contemporary Christianity. “He equips the called. And His equipping is never merely skill-transfer — it is always character formation. He makes you into the person the calling requires, through the very experiences you would have chosen to avoid” (The Nature of God, p. 89, Graham Cooke).

The experiences you would have chosen to avoid.

The annulment. The grief. The slow, unglamorous years of caring for Lois’s father in Michigan. The Japan season where the organic church vision moved far more slowly than I had hoped. The two years of quiet, outside-the-building fellowship that felt sometimes like exile and other times like the most real thing I had ever been part of.

Every single one of those seasons was God equipping me for exactly the calling He had prepared in advance. I couldn’t see it while I was inside it. But looking back — the thread is unmistakable.

John Eldredge describes calling in terms of the “role in the story” that no one else can play.

“God has written a part in His story that was written with your name on it,” he says. “Not a generic part — your part. With your history, your wounds, your gifts, your particular way of seeing the world. If you don’t play it, it goes unplayed. The story has a gap where you were supposed to be” (Epic, p. 103, John Eldredge).

A gap where you were supposed to be.

That image has stayed with me for years. Not as a source of pressure — but as a source of profound, motivating significance. What I carry, specifically and uniquely, matters. Not because I am exceptional. But because the God who crafted me as a poiēma — as a poem, a specific artistic work — had something specific in mind when He made me. And He is not willing to settle for a substitute.

Frank Viola roots all of this in the headship of Christ.

Individual calling, he argues, only makes full sense in the context of the corporate calling of the body — because the body of Christ is designed to function as an integrated whole, with every member carrying a specific and irreplaceable contribution to the full expression of Christ in the world. Your calling is not just about your personal fulfillment. It is about what the body of Christ is incomplete without.

“The church,” Viola writes, “is not a collection of individuals each pursuing their own calling in parallel. It is a living body, and every member’s calling is connected to every other member’s calling — because together, they are meant to express something that no individual member can express alone” (Reimagining Church, p. 48, Frank Viola).

This is why the relational dimension of calling — the Lk10 community, the home fellowship, the mutual discernment of calling within genuine community — is not optional. You cannot fully discover or fully live your calling in isolation. You need the body. The body needs you.

TAKEAWAY LESSON:

You are God’s poiēma — His specific, intentional, artistically crafted work — and the calling He has prepared for you in advance is as unique as you are. Stop waiting for a calling that looks like someone else’s. Pay attention to what breaks your heart, fires your imagination, and keeps pulling you forward. That is the shape of your calling.

Calling Discovery Exercise: Answer these three questions in writing: What problem in the world — or in the church — do you find yourself unable to stop thinking about?

What experiences in your past — including the painful ones — have uniquely equipped you to address that problem? And who specifically are the people you most want to serve? Let those three answers sit together. The overlap is your calling.*

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com