Is God Calling Me to Blog? – When the Well Runs Dry
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You have to get a blog post out in a couple of days. You sit down at your computer ready to get to work. Your topic may have been picked and you may have researched your keywords. Yet there you sit, staring blankly at the screen that is just as empty as your mind feels at that moment. You’ve got nothing; not a word. Then the thoughts begin to fill your head! The thoughts that pretty much every faith blogger has had; is God calling me to blog? How do I know if this is God or just me?
Hello…God Calling!
God can call some of us in very unique ways! What God has for me and for you may not come together for some time! It may come in bits and pieces and not mesh together into a recognizable calling for years. He may bring us into our calling a little at a time. That was definitely true in my case! I would discover what God has for me and my calling years and years after the foundation was being laid.
But IS God Calling Me?
So you may find yourself asking ‘is God calling me?’
One way to know your call is to know what you love and what you are passionate about! What you think about day in and day out!
When I was eight years old I lived in Manhattan. At the corner of my street was a beautiful, ornate Catholic church! I used to love to go into the church, which was open all day, and just sit, watching people come in to light candles and pray.
I liked to listen to the choir practice. The smells, the sights, the feel of the church were all things I loved. I also loved the missals. In fact, I loved the missals so much that I used to take them home with me!
Yes…I stole the missals!
I would take these missals home and sit my dolls and my stuffed animals on my bed and conduct mass for them! There were no other churches in my neighborhood but Catholic churches so mass was all I knew! It was the only church I had growing up, but I am not Catholic today!
I loved preaching to them and I would often go off topic and preach verses I knew from my mother’s Bible. Yes, I went rogue on the missals!
She had a HUGE Bible that weighed a ton to a little girl and I would carry it with all my might into my room and sit and read and just feel the pages in my little fingers. I loved the feel of it, I loved the red letters, I loved the images portrayed in the various sections. I loved everything about that Bible and I spent a lot of time with it.
In fact, at only eight years old I began to track all the family tree information and births and deaths in the Bible for the family. I had a connection to it that was probably quite unusual for an eight-year-old who had more Jewish family than not and who was not raised in a “religious” church-going home. Yet God was calling to me anyway! I felt Him calling; I just didn’t know what it meant.
Answer Your Call
How do I know God is calling me you ask? Look back on your childhood. Your call can show up at a very early age and through some pretty unusual means! I know that was definitely the case with me.
As I reached ten years old, I began to develop another love; a love of writing. I was reading at the age of three and I actually started writing stories at five years old but then abandoned it for a while. My first story was about a frog. My mother remembered it well but I cannot recall much about it other than the topic.
But at ten, I began to sit and write for hours and hours at a time; anything from plays to stories to poems. I wrote and then threw it out. I rarely ever let anyone read what I wrote. They would see me writing for days at a time and ask to read it but I would say no.
It was for me only. In fact, I believe the only person to read one of my plays was my older sister when I was fourteen and she was 31. She raved about it but again, I threw it out. I didn’t have much confidence in my writing but I knew I loved it so that is why I continued to do it.
Yet my love of teaching the Word and my love of writing had never converged. Not yet anyway. Your call can come together in pieces as God prepares you for each of those pieces to wed.
Is God Calling Me? – Knowing What God Has For Me
Years later, when I was 30 years old, my sister shared her newfound faith with me. That sharing changed my life.
I began studying the Bible in a new way! It came alive for me in a way it never had! I had been reading it all those years but never through the eyes I now saw it.
Jesus now came alive for me in a way that I had never experienced before! Because of this, I read everything I could get my hands on! I practically lived at the local Christian bookstore for the first year of mynew life in Jesus. This was 1996 so the internet was really just becoming a big thing and there were chat rooms for Christians that I just immersed myself in! I could not seem to get enough of God!
I had stopped writing years before this. Marriage happened and I had children and writing just completely fell by the wayside. Writing didn’t even cross my mind again until 2014. That was when God put that love back into my heart.
I thought about writing books and even started a couple, but it never went anywhere after starting them. I stopped at the start. Then, in 2015, God gave me a vision for a ministry!
I started Worth Beyond Rubies and God merged my love of writing with my love of teaching! He merged my Jewish roots with my love for Jesus!
God brought together the two passions He started in me when I was only a child.
He gave me a love for encouraging women, sharing my struggles, sharing the Jewish roots of the faith and helping bloggers overcome doubt and comparison!
But I blogged for a while and then stopped. I took a break due to relocating and some other changes. In June of 2018 I started over from scratch. God had never stopped calling to me.
Is God Calling Me When the Well Runs Dry?
Yet sometimes we get to a point where we question our calling and we DO ask ‘how do I know God is calling me and it is not just my own wants’?
God spent years forging these loves in me and having them culminate in this blog and this ministry and yet, the first time I sit down to write a post and nothing comes to me, I question that calling!
I start to question whether or not this is really God or whether it is me just wanting to marry these two passions of mine! I question whether or not I am merely striving and God is not in it! And that is when God answers me and tells me that yes, I am striving but not in the way I think! You are striving, He shows me, but not in your calling.
He shows me “You’re striving by trying to use your own mind instead of listening to Me and seeing what I want you to say! You are seeking your own message rather than hearing the one I want to give you! You are not spending enough time in prayer seeking Me rather than seeking ideas that you can come up with yourself.”
That can happen when we have been writing for some time. We develop topics and ideas and, at times, God has other plans! He showed me the problem is not my calling, it is how I am responding to it.
Like the tower of Babel, I can fall into trying to build it myself.
My Own Tower of Babel
Genesis 11:1-7:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” NIV
I have put myself in front of that computer multiple times trying to strive and come up with the words to say and asking “Is God calling me or am I just doing this on my own?” but the truth is, never once have I sat in God’s presence and had Him NOT plant the words in me!
Unbeknownst to me, I was attempting to build a name for myself by trying to come up with my own ideas. I wasn’t actively seeking to do that, but the enemy will always try to pervert what we do for God by having us begin to do for ourselves! He will try to get us to try to do things in our own power and ultimately fail so that we abandon the call God has for us.
Without God in what I do, I couldn’t do it. That much is clear! I wasn’t going to the source as much as I should have! At times when the well runs dry, I can come boldly before the throne of grace and have Jesus fill me with living water, fill me back up rather than rely on my own strength!
If I don’t seek the living water, the well runs dry! I was praying but I was talking AT God rather than listening to Him. I wasn’t allowing myself to be filled by Him because I was too busy talking and I wasn’t taking the time to listen. And I wasn’t taking the time to allow Him to give me what He wanted me to write about and share with others.
John 7:37-39:
On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. NKJV
If your well feels dry at times and you question your call, go to Jesus who is the source and get filled up again! It is not your calling you need to question, it is what you are seeking as your source! Make sure He is the source of what fills you! Then you never need to ask ‘how do I know God is calling me?’. You will know!
Philippians 1:6
…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. NIV
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This is so encouraging, thanks for sharing! Your calling as a child is so fun to read, it’s crazy how God works sometimes, isn’t it?
Thank you! Yes God definitely works in some fun ways!
I absolutely love this post and find it so encouraging because you shared through your personal experience. I’m so glad I found you and your blog! Shalom!
Shalom Michelle! So glad you enjoyed it and so glad you found me!
Your story about stealing the missals had me cracking up! I don’t remember stealing anything from church, but I used to stuff my pockets full of coffee beans from the grocery store. Haha! Kids are weird. But in all seriousness, thank you for another encouraging post to bloggers. It’s good to know that even seasoned bloggers question this calling. Doubt can totally be from the enemy…this internet ministry is a powerful tool and I’m sure he wants it destroyed.
Amen! You are so right! It is an extremely powerful ministry and he would love to do nothing more than silence all of us. It gives each one of us a chance to reach people all across the globe that we would never be able to reach without the internet! So it is definitely a threat to the enemy! You are doing an amazing job in your ministry so never let him discourage you!!
Thank you for the encouragement. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to sit quietly and listen to what God has to say to you!
Amen! It is difficult at times and yet so rewarding!
I enjoyed reading part of your journey! laurensparks.net
Thank you!
Loved this and it was so encouraging. I have learned to always pray and seek God’s direction before I sit down to write.
Thank you Ayanna!! I’ve learned too that it’s so important. I can easily get busy and sit down trying to write first but it never works lol. God is definitely keeping me in check!!
I love your church story. As an old movie fan I always wanted to do that. I too lived across the street from a church in Atlanta, but it was not open. And sometimes, the need was overwhelming to go. I have never had a dry well, it was just filled with rocks thrown by the enemy. I too wrote from childhood and sadly too, rejection caused me to throw away things but He never rejected me. And have you notice the google translate for blogs? I looked at mine in so many languages. I don’t have nearly that many readers, but it gets to who needs to hear it. Thanks, Diane.
Thank you! And yes, God will get it in front of those who need to hear it!!
I, too, had to discern between whether it was my ADHD or if it was really God calling me to this ministry. I’ve only come to know God in the last 5 years, so the thought of being a “Christian Blogger” never occurred to me. My blogging journey began far from the Christian niche but everything I’ve done along the way, all the learning and all the connections I’ve made, have brought me to launching a Christian blog ministry.
That is so awesome!!! Think of all the people who can relate to you and all the people you’ll be encouraging
It is good to no what you are called to do. I am also happy to see your zeal for the things of God
Thank you so much Ingrid!
Thanks for this encouragement, Dianne. Blessings to you!
Thank you!! God bless!!
What a wonderful story and testimony! i do believe God has called me to write but leaning on Him daily for guidance!
Thank you!! Leaning on Him for guidance is the best thing you could do!
God never wastes anything, I’ve been told, so it makes sense He would take our passions and turn them into our callings.
It is true the enemy will try to discourage us. If we pay attention to our stats, it’s very easy for him to do. I try to focus on the fact that if just one soul gets something out of a post, I’ve done what I was called to do.
Amen! God will use your posts for His glory and in His timing!! Who He needs to see it, He will bring to it!
This is such a wonderful post. Thank you so much for sharing your story, and your encouragement with us over at the Grace and Truth Link-Up.
Thank you Heather!