A picture is worth a thousand words. All the theory about calling and destiny makes so much more sense when you see it in a picture. So, here you have one. A picture of a young woman, Cassie Anderson, who is taking the leap into her destiny! – Dave Rodriguez

 ” A person’s steps are directed by the Lord.  How then can anyone understand their own way?” Proverbs 20:24

Four years ago, I stepped full time into a career that was supposed to be the end all for me.  I had stayed home with my children for the past eight years, loving and raising them, and was finally fulfilling the calling I thought was on my life, to not only mother, but teach other children as well.  It’s noble, right? The calling to teach?

But it turns out, it wasn’t my calling.  I was miserable.

I continued day after day, fighting my hardest to fit myself into this calling until slowly, step by step, I began allowing the possibility into my mind that maybe, just maybe, the thing I thought I wanted to do from the time I was four years old, the thing I had spent four years of college and thousands of dollars on, wasn’t actually what I was supposed to be doing.

What a terrifying place that is.

It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing you have to jump, because jumping has to be better than forcing yourself to stay in a place that you know, down to the very core of who you are, is not where you should be. But there is a wall of clouds you are jumping into, and you have absolutely no idea what is beyond those clouds.

So, I began to pray… really, really pray.  Not just a mumbling of a request, but a deep yearning prayer for the knowledge of what it was God was calling me to.  I felt like it was there, just out of my reach, the answer unclear and vague.  I’m not even sure how God orchestrated the next steps, but He was clearly leading and excited for me to discover His reason for creating me, and so He led me to the chance to walk through my Calling Quilt with Dave Rodriguez on stage at our church during a weekend service.  I spent weeks preparing, compiling facts about my life, digging deep into how I really felt about things, trying to discover what made me come alive, learning who I was at the core of my person.  I was excited, I was filled with trepidation, I was bruised from pulling up the wounded parts of my past, and I was overwhelmed with fear that maybe God wasn’t ready to reveal anything to me.  What if this didn’t work?  What if there was no lightning bolt?

As we started the process of sifting through all of the information I had brought with me, I watched the Holy Spirit lead Dave to significant aspects of my life, personality and passions that he started to patch together into my Calling Quilt.  One of the most significant was that my calling to teach and love does not lie with children, but with their parents –  more specifically their mothers.

I felt the burden of living outside of my calling fall off my shoulders, and I finally felt freedom to allow my life to follow a different path.  I can’t say I had a huge lightning bolt moment that day on stage.  It was more like a sunrise, a slow lighting of my new way.  I did not walk away knowing exactly what I was going to do, but I did walk away with a new understanding of who I was and how I was gifted.  It was things about myself that I had never thought twice about becoming strengths and ways I could impact those around me for God’s Kingdom.  I began reaching out to ministries in our church and to people around me to test and see where I might fit, and I found my place teaching and serving the mothers of our church.

I know that this is just the start of my second mountain living, of living within my calling.  I can’t go back – how I view my life has completely changed. Everything I do now has eternity in its view.

My prayer for you as you journey into finding your calling is that you will fully abandon yourself to the One who created you.  Jump off that cliff into the clouds, and find life in living fully into your calling. You won’t look back.