When I turned 14 my first job was at a Christian Conference Center in eastern Pennsylvania. My parents had worked there my whole life, and I was very familiar with the place, having even lived on the grounds for the first few years of my life. Most of the work I did was odd jobs: mowing lawns, weed whacking, setting up chairs for meetings, and generally the kind of stuff that you can have a 14-year-old do to help a place look nice or get set up for upcoming events. I worked there on weekends and sometimes on weekdays after school, but the busiest time of year was in the late spring and summer.
After I had been working there for a year or so, the recreation manager, Allen, approached me in the spring. He was planning ahead for the upcoming busy summer season, and he was trying to put together enough people to form a class of lifeguard trainees. The idea didn’t really appeal to me, though. I liked playing in the pool as a kid, but the idea of swimming laps and doing all kinds of training, and then sitting in a chair yelling at people to stop running wasn’t something I was interested in. At least with my current job I got to be out of the sun part of the time.
Allen mentioned the idea to me a few more times after that, but I kept turning him down. His final pitch was the most memorable. It was a day of sweaty manual labor. A road around the pool was getting some light posts installed along the perimeter. That meant somebody had to dig a trench between each pair of light posts in order to run a power cable to all of them. I’ll give you two guesses who that “somebody” was, but you’re only going to need one.
I had been swinging a pickaxe and scooping out dirt all morning, and it was hot and humid under the mid-afternoon sun. My shirt was drenched, and I was sore and tired. I had to take breaks more frequently, and sweat was constantly running down my face and getting in my eyes. Along came Allen. He had a little bit of a smirk on his face.
“You see what you’re doing?”
“Uh huh?”
He pointed to a lifeguard sitting at the edge of the pool with her feet in the water, twirling a whistle around two fingers while getting paid to work on her tan.
“You see what she’s doing?”
“Uh huh.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be doing that?”
He got me signed up for the class.
Sometimes you have to go looking for opportunities, and sometimes God plops them right in your path through someone like Allen. None of my reasons for avoiding the opportunity he presented were all that great; I just didn’t feel like doing it. I avoided the opportunity, but it just kept knocking.
You ever have an experience like that? In addition to the way you see how you might be suited for something, others may have some pretty valuable insight, too. If there’s someone in your life that keeps offering you the chance to be a part of a given ministry, but you’ve been turning them down, have you really stopped to ask yourself why? I’m guessing that it’s either because you don’t feel like that’s what you’re meant to do, or because you might feel like it’s a waste of your talents. If that person keeps singling you out, though, consider giving them a chance. They might see potential in you that you haven’t even thought about.
It could be the start of your ministry sweet spot.