Finding Your Calling When God Seems Quiet

I spent three years waiting for a burning-bush moment to tell me what to do with my life. It never came. What came instead was slower and more reliable.

I was twenty-six, post-college, working a job that paid well and meant nothing. I knew I was supposed to be doing something that mattered. I just didn't know what. I prayed about it constantly. I read books about calling. I went to a two-day retreat specifically about vocational discernment. I came home from the retreat with good notes and no clarity.

The mistake I was making — I can see it clearly now — was treating calling like a destination to be located rather than a direction to walk. I was waiting for God to hand me a map with a red X. What He was doing instead was placing desires and abilities inside me like seeds, and waiting to see if I would water them.

Psalm 37:4 says 'Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.' I had read that as a promise about wish fulfillment. But I came to understand it differently: delight yourself in God, and He will place into your heart the very desires He wants to fulfill through you. He is the source of the desires, not just the fulfiller of them.

So I started paying attention to what I was drawn toward. Not what I was told to be good at, not what was financially optimal, but what genuinely lit me up. Turns out I was drawn toward systems — finding inefficiency and designing better processes. And I was drawn toward developing people — coaching, mentoring, watching someone grow.

Those two things are basically what organizational leadership is. I didn't see that immediately. I saw it slowly, as I said yes to small opportunities that aligned with those interests and noticed what happened.

Frederik Buechner's famous line: 'The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.' Both sides of that equation matter. Not just your gladness — there has to be a genuine need. But also not just the world's need — you have to bring your particular self to it, not someone else's self.

I also learned that calling is rarely discovered in isolation. Other people often see your gifts before you do. The person who kept asking me to help design their organization's systems. The friend who said 'you're unusually good at that, why aren't you doing more of it?' These observations from outside are data. Take them seriously.

I'm now doing work I find genuinely meaningful. It didn't arrive in one revelatory moment. It arrived through fifteen years of following small lights, saying yes to things that aligned with my wiring, and trusting that the path would become visible one step at a time.

The burning bush was not wrong. But it was for Moses, in Moses's specific moment, for a particular exodus. Your call may arrive quieter. It may arrive through ordinary days, ordinary conversations, ordinary noticing. That doesn't make it less real.