A Life Calling

My team drove through New Mexico yesterday and arrived in sweltering Arizona tonight. I flew out of Colorado and into beautiful North Carolina to enjoy a week of family vacation at the Outer Banks. While leaving camp wasn't terribly hard (I'll be back on Friday!), I was struggling with the idea that I would be laying on the beach, enjoying time to myself while my team was working and serving at camp.  As I was flying through a lightning storm on the way to Raleigh, my mind was working through this idea.  And then I finally started to get it. 

Outer Banks Beach at sunset

Serving at camp is a specific kind of service, a certain setting in which I can use my talents and gifts and even my mistakes to point to Christ and honor him.  But how is home any different?  Am I not called to serve my family, too, perhaps even better than I serve at camp?  Am I not supposed to die to myself at home, with my parents and siblings, the way I strive to die to myself at camp?  Shouldn't my joy be even more constant and overflowing at home, the way I strive to have joy at camp?  Aren't I called to be a servant leader in my home?  Being a servant is a life calling, not a summer calling.

God has called me to serve at Worldview this summer, and I am so grateful.  I love working at camp: studying the Word and sitting through thought-provoking lectures; talking with students and hearing their hearts; building lasting friendships with staff; laughing, crying, praying. But being at home with my family, going to school, being with friends, living "everyday" life: this is my calling, too. Each day, every day, is a gift from God that I get to live.  My joy should be complete in every hour, because I am Christ's child and I get to have a relationship with Him.  Where I am serving should not change the way I am serving.

This is such a simple truth (seemingly), but a difficult one to grasp on some days.  I pray that this week, although I am missing being at camp, that my heart would rejoice in being away from camp.  I pray that as I move through "mundane" tasks of daily life, both this week and after camp, that I would seek to be obedient to the calling on my life - to be a servant, to die to self.  May I live fully for the Lord, being reminded that I am His, in both this life and the next.

"For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living." Romans 14:7-9.