The Future Challenge
What does God have for me in the future? I really want to get it right. If I do get involved in a new missionary role, what should it be? Where should it be? What about my career? What should I do about a house? What about retirement? What about my children? My aging parents?”
After college at, say, 22-42 our choices are many, often too many. How do I find a mission job that best with my skills and interest? Will it be abroad or overseas? Among the displaced, the Diaspora? In causes like Human Trafficking, Social Justice, with an Unreached People Group or Unengaged People Group (UPG)?
A good way to find out is to take skill assessment tests. You may have already taken some of these, but Strength Finders is a useful tool. With that in hand select elements of the MissionNext profile that fit your strengths. Take the results to a mission organization at the beginning of the negotiation with them. For you it may be to explore service opportunities short-term. Or it may be mission opportunities for a next career package. A good way to start is to have a conversation with mission organizations that have options that fit your schooling, experience and preferences.
Short cut the process here a missionnext.org to find organizations to that fit you best. By completing a MissionNext profile you will find a list of matching organizations by percent fit. Psalm 85:13 is essentially that the Lord makes a path for our steps. We have to be stepping. The Apostle Paul was on a journey without a destination firmly in mind. He was stepping. He had three places in mind, but none of them seemed right. Finally, Paul had ideas but finally a vision, a dream, to go to Macedonia. Because he was stepping the Lord gave him direction. In our college days when there is a lot of talk about finding God’s “perfect” will for our lives.
One of the dominant thoughts on the subject was that God had one perfect answer for each of our life situations and our job was to make sure we made the right decision. We had to find the exact center…the dot…the one right answer for life’s major decisions…which college to attend, making sure we married the right person, getting the right job, having the right career, involvement in the right ministry, and on and on. Gary Friesen in his book, “Decision Making and The Will of God ” concludes there is no “dot.” But rather we were to use godly wisdom to make the best decisions, trusting that God was sovereign and would guide our decision-making.
The subject of God’s sovereign will, his moral will, and his individual will, is deep. The topic is thought-provoking. It is not our purpose to exhaust it here. But there are some helpful guidelines we can pass along. God is not trying to trick us. He created us. He loves us. He cares for us. He teaches us that he has prepared good things in advance for us to do in our future (Eph. 2:10For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.).
Most of those good things are before us every day in the normal interactions of life, being Christ-like in the way we live and treat those around us. Others fall into the category of larger-impact decisions and, rightly so, we want to get it right.