Time to RE-IGNITE Your Calling!
I have lost myself. Again.
Do you ever have those seasons? Where the noises of this world tend to overpower you? Where you forget and begin to question who you are? Where the seeds of doubt seem to crowd out everything else?
Yup - me too. That has been me these past couple of months. It started back in early Fall when I felt the nudge to slow down. I had just finished up radiation and was about to launch my membership community and just felt like God told me to ‘Take a minute’. To PAUSE and reflect. To re-center. And I did. I hit the PAUSE button and just allowed myself to BE.
I read.
I studied the Word.
I refocused on my health.
Did some yoga.
And it all felt great. It really has. Yet in these past few weeks, I’ve felt myself floundering again. Looking around more. Paying more attention to what others are doing vs. pursuing where God is calling ME. I started to question my voice. I started to think more about what others thought or would think. How things would LOOK. And I let that affect my purpose. I let that affect how I showed UP.
Earlier this summer when pursuing my style consultant certification with Fashion Meets Faith, I crafted my own style mission statement. This is now an exercise I do with my own clients during a style consult. It’s where you spend time creating a statement that reflects who God created you to BE. You can read more about that HERE. My style mission statement is:
I am a vibrant, gracious, ignitor of light!
THIS is who God created me to be, yet somehow I had lost sight of that. In my time of pause and reflection, I spent more time focused on ME and not on others. Not on my mission and purpose. I stopped SERVING and instead became too SELF ABSORBED. While I do believe it’s good to pause and reflect sometimes, it’s a fine line we walk there. We can become overly focused on ourselves, when we were created to SERVE. In her book Chasing Perfect, Alisha Illian says it so well:
Instead of saying, ‘You can’t love others until you love yourself’, we should be saying, ‘You can’t love others until you FORGET yourself’.
The world would have us do the opposite. The world tells us things like:
You have worked so hard! You deserve a break!
Taking time for yourself is a form of self care!
This year has been a doozy! Cut yourself some slack!
And while all of those things are true and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, when God calls you to something MORE, something beyond yourself, you will feel out of integrity if you don’t follow the call. Here is the thing, sis: Jesus straight up told his disciples that they will need to lay down their lives to follow the call. They needed to DIE TO SELF in order to fulfill the call on their lives and we do to. You will NOT feel fulfilled until you do. Just like I have floundered these past few months. It’s because He’s calling us to something GREATER.
And it’s time to answer the call. It’s time that I ‘put on’ my style mission statement every. single. day. It won’t be executed perfectly. I won’t always do or say the right thing. The action I take will be messy. BUT I will feel more fulfilled because I will be walking out the journey that He created just for me.
How about you? What is He calling you to? In what area of your life do you need to DIE TO SELF? I’m here for you, sis! Praying for you and cheering you on!
In Style & Grace,