What is your assignment?

the monthly letter

Sometimes (though not often) the simplest shift can bring life into focus.

I can’t point at the fractured attention span of the “world out there” in good conscience — without looking at my own wandering mind and minutes. I, perhaps like you, have made many attempts to reign in my flitting thoughts, my constant distractions, my fidgety behavior of life and mind. And the latest help He’s sent has been one of these simple shifts.

It started with remembering an old story … a story from the summer after I turned sixteen.

I signed up to serve for a month at a Young Life summer camp. There were 30 of us from all over the United States. We wanted Jesus, we wanted friendship with others who were seeking Him, we wanted growth in our relationship with Him … and some of us also wanted boyfriends 😉.

The jobs included things like cleaning toilets and bathrooms, doing the camp’s laundry, washing dishes after three meals (plus snacks), or waiting tables for other high school students who’d come to attend the camp and hear about Jesus. Although all the jobs made for long days, one of them included the opportunity to interface with teenagers beyond our volunteer work crew multiple times a day as we served them meals. Except for the unusually mature, most of us wanted that job. Waiting tables meant wearing cute clothes and makeup and meeting a lot of new people.

I got that job. And while I spent my days interfacing with fun teenagers in a spot-lighted job, my new friend Abby (who is still one of my dearest friends, to this day) worked in the “pits.”

I’m not sure if they called it that because it felt like an armpit of a job or if everyone doing it had to climb out of the doldrums to volunteer again, day after day, into the dark corner of the camp washing dishes. Regardless, what I remember is that those people were the happiest. Maybe not the first 3 or 4 days as they realized they’d spend one whole summer month indoors, with pruned fingers, smelling of dish soap, and cleaning drain catches in between more dishes. But not too far into the month it was clear, the pits wasn’t “the pits.”

Nearly thirty years later, I think about the tension the rest of us felt in signing up to “give our lives away” for this one month, while also reapplying our lipstick in between meals and fielding “that server is cute … what’s her name and where is she from?” messages. We were there to find a future husband — with a little of “giving our lives away” in between. For the six people in the pits, they were (at least a bit more than the rest of us) living up to the experience coined as the “month to give your life away.”

They knew their assignment.

Fast forward to these days. Our days and lives are fractured. I certainly have more pulls on my time, my attention, and my focus now than I did ten years ago, but the more alarming part of today’s living is that I have more pulls on those parts of my life than I did one year ago. The world’s treadmill of information is only increasing. I can’t even pump gas without hearing the news at the pump. Even country living can feel like Times Square, these days.

A recent aha! for me is coming to realize that knowing my assignment for my current season is a part of what gives me the strength to focus on it within this fractured world with all its pulls. As one who’s been passively parented by our culture into believing that the whole of life is formed around “big vision and mission”, it takes a focus-fight for me to remember that the in-between time is what forms a man or a woman.

I wrote a book about these in-between times, yet I hadn’t considered how the simple act of asking God for His assignment for me in them time might shape the way I approach it. Biding my time — distractable, easily irritated, daydreaming about what’s next rather than being present — versus placing my hand in His and saying, with my mind and my focus “I want to be all in with You, right here” may not look all that different in hours or days, but it makes a world of difference inside the minutes.

Those people in the pits — my friend Abby and the other five — had a quick, aggressive reckoning with their assignment when they were told to leave the cute clothes in their suitcase and that most of what they would wear that month they’d toss at the end.

Something about knowing where you are makes it easier to embrace it.

Maybe you, like me, are in an in-between moment in your life … one where you’ve accidentally started biding your time. One where maybe you’ve wondered if the fractures in our world have become fractures in your own brain because you’ve struggled to focus, felt a bit squirrely, and found yourself daydreaming more than living present. I want to encourage you (like He’s encouraging me): we can ask for wisdom about our assignment, even when we might hear something like I’ve heard recently: live in the small, stay present in loving when it’s hard, pour out in ways that no one will see, but Me.

Yes, friends, even something like this can be a heavenly assignment.

And, somehow for me, knowing this has made all the difference for the minutes of my day.

Peter calls God the “shepherd and overseer of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25). I live like my own overseer, my own shepherd much of the time, oh so subtly. Part of leaning into being shepherded, overseen, is asking small questions like “what season do you have me in, God?” and “what is my assignment here in this season?” and “how should I see these days?” These questions are a simple way of saying “I can make my plans, but You determine my steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

Those six people in the pits, in some ways, had it easier than the rest of us servers. They learned quickly that their assignment was to serve in secret. Ours was the same, but perhaps we needed more reminding because the flirty boys at the table and the loud cheers when we walked out of the kitchen with the dinner trays didn’t quite match the assignment for which we really came.

This story came back to me as I was realizing the need to ask that age-old question that I’d forgotten — what is my assignment, Lord? We’ve got four all-in-a-line to launch during the next short years and some of our friends are finding their nests soon empty. The look of this upcoming season could distract me from my assignment — much like I experienced in that dining lodge on Saranac Lake nearly 30 years ago.

I need the quiet whispers, reminders that reach beyond just the obvious evidence in front of me — I have an assignment. In every season there is an assignment and sometimes, like these times for me it’s as *small* as “find Me in the diaper changes and kissing owies and serving another meal.” And oftentimes my internal assignment doesn’t match the exterior of my life. The evidence in front of me — my age, these children launching soon, my friends around me, and their seasons as they move into more of the “sage” years ahead — doesn’t match my assignment. Hence, I have the propensity to bide my time and thus be easily distracted … daydreaming with a low-grade irritation.

That whisper from God — that slight calibration — takes me from biding my time to seeing my role.

Some of you may need to set down your phone or close your computer and begin the process of asking Him: what is my assignment in this season?

It may not match your surroundings, but knowing it may be what your heart needs to settle … to focus.

{And for those of you interested in diving deeper into topics like this, my more-private writing space SOAR is open at a discount for a few more days. Twice a year we open it up at this discounted rate. It’s my place to write a bit more candidly … and a little more often.}

Until next month,

Sara