The supernatural calling of God does not always unfold in the way we expect. Sometimes God speaks, awakens a desire, and places a genuine calling in our hearts, yet the visible circumstances of our lives seem to contradict everything he has shown us. We expect a supernatural calling to produce supernatural acceleration, open doors, recognized ministry, and unmistakable forward movement. Instead, God may lead us downward into ordinary work, hidden service, painful correction, and the death of our need to appear important.

That has been my experience, and it has changed the way I understand calling. I once believed that receiving a calling meant I needed to find the right position, church, opportunity, or platform as quickly as possible. However, God seemed more interested in forming the person carrying the calling than in rapidly fulfilling the calling itself. The delay was not evidence that God had forgotten me, because the delay was one of the supernatural ways he was preparing me.

Living Between Ministry and Manual Labor

For much of my adult life, I felt as though I lived two different lives. In one life, I loved ministry, theology, preaching, teaching, and pursuing the knowledge and presence of God. I earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, recorded podcasts, preached sermons, studied doctrine, and carried a persistent hope that God would eventually open the ministry door I had been waiting for. That side of my life felt connected to purpose, identity, and the supernatural calling of God.

In the other life, I worked in construction. My days involved electrical work, budgets, materials, job sites, paperwork, physical exhaustion, and the pressure of making projects come in under budget. I had completed an apprenticeship, learned a trade, and developed the callused hands that come from years of gritty labor. Yet those hands often felt disconnected from the life I believed God had called me to live.

I knew God had called me toward ministry, but I also kept waking up to work in an industry I did not want to remain in. That contradiction wore on me because it seemed to place God’s promise and my daily reality in direct conflict. It is one thing to believe that God has placed a calling on your life during prayer, worship, or a powerful spiritual encounter. It is another thing to hold onto that belief while ordering materials, answering customer calls, repairing damaged wiring, and trying to keep a construction project profitable.

When Calling Becomes Mixed With Ambition

For years, I wanted God to move me upward. I would not have described my desire in those terms because I had more spiritual language available to me. I would have talked about calling, opportunity, ministry, influence, and open doors. Underneath those respectable words, however, lived a hunger to do something visible enough to prove that my life had not been forgotten.

The desire for ministry was real, but it was not completely pure. I genuinely wanted to preach, teach, serve the church, and help people know God. At the same time, I wanted to serve God in a way that preserved my preferred image of significance. I wanted obedience, but I strongly preferred obedience with a title, audience, or recognizable ministry attached to it.

This is one reason discernment matters when we talk about the supernatural calling of God. God may truly call someone while that person still carries pride, insecurity, ambition, and a need for affirmation. The presence of human weakness does not necessarily cancel a divine calling, but it does mean God must form the person who receives it. A helpful companion to this discussion is Mike Winger’s teaching on recognizing false humility and maintaining confidence without feeding pride.

God Called Me Into Hidden Service

After years of frustration, depression, hard labor, and closed ministry doors, I finally stopped trying to force my way forward. I quit applying to churches and programs, and I stopped treating every possible opportunity as the doorway that would rescue me from obscurity. Eventually, I told God that I would pour myself out at Griggs Church and become the best layperson and servant I could be. I did not know whether another ministry opportunity would come, but I knew I could be faithful where God had already placed me.

That surrender was much harder than it sounds. The problem was not that lay ministry was beneath me, although my heart may have quietly acted as though it was. The deeper problem was that serving without recognition removed many of the rewards my ego wanted. God was inviting me to discover whether I loved obedience when obedience looked small, hidden, and insignificant.

That hidden season became part of my spiritual formation. It also reflected a truth explored throughout the Fresh Ground Theology podcast: God’s supernatural activity often appears in ordinary obedience before it appears in dramatic outcomes. The Holy Spirit does not work only through public miracles, prophetic moments, or visible breakthroughs. He also works supernaturally by confronting pride, strengthening endurance, reshaping desire, and teaching us to remain faithful when nobody is applauding.

A Door Opened After I Stopped Forcing It

After about five months of serving, I repeatedly sensed that God wanted me to pray with Mitch, my pastor. The impression felt unusual and almost random, but it continued returning with enough weight that I could not comfortably dismiss it. I eventually approached him, and we prayed together several times. Then, almost without warning, Mitch encouraged me to apply for a ministry residency at Fellowship Greenville.

Apparently, I had already applied for the position once and had forgotten about it. This time, however, the door opened in a way that felt surprisingly easy. The opportunity was not glamorous, and a residency was not the final destination I had imagined for myself. Nevertheless, it was a real door, and God opened it only after he had begun loosening my grip on the outcome.

This experience taught me something important about hearing God’s voice. Divine guidance does not always arrive as a complete explanation or a detailed map of the future. Sometimes the Holy Spirit gives a simple prompting, such as praying with someone, serving in one place, making one phone call, or taking one faithful step. Bill Johnson discusses this relationship between Scripture, discernment, and spiritual sensitivity in his teaching on hearing God’s voice through Scripture.

The Residency Did Not End the Lesson

It would have been easy to interpret the residency as God finally rewarding my ambition. I could have treated it as the arrival of the version of myself I had been waiting to become. However, the residency was another classroom in the same spiritual education. The subject was still humility, and God had no intention of allowing a new opportunity to hide the pride he wanted to heal.

Pride does not always announce itself through obvious arrogance. Sometimes pride disguises itself as calling, usefulness, excellence, theological conviction, or a desire to accomplish great things for God. It can hide underneath our prayers for influence and ask whether anyone has noticed our faithfulness yet. Even sincere ministry desires can become entangled with our hunger to feel important.

Before the residency had properly begun, pressure started building. My work responsibilities, my wife’s work, financial concerns, exhaustion, disturbing dreams, and a growing spiritual heaviness pushed me toward my emotional limits. I did not understand everything that was happening, but I knew that something underneath the visible stress was being exposed. Two weeks into the residency, I sent Mitch a text saying that I intended to quit.

God Used Loving Correction

Sending that text was not my finest moment. Even when quitting is the correct decision, a sudden text message is rarely the wisest way to handle it. At the time, I blamed the strain of balancing work and the residency. That explanation was convenient because programs, jobs, schedules, and other people are easier to blame than the unhealed condition of our own hearts.

God has a way of using circumstances to expose what lies beneath the circumstances. The elders brought me into a meeting and named patterns I had spent years trying not to examine directly. They addressed emotionalism, anxiety, anger, instability, and some of the painful patterns associated with my ADHD. They also confronted the sinful and immature ways I had allowed those patterns to govern my behavior.

The elders did not approach me cruelly. Cruel correction can often be dismissed because our attention shifts from the truth of the criticism to the harshness of the person delivering it. These men corrected me with love, patience, and a genuine concern for my future. Loving correction is much more difficult to dismiss because it gets past our defenses without attempting to destroy us.

They helped me understand that these patterns could not remain untouched if I wanted to pastor people faithfully. I could not responsibly shepherd souls while making my unregulated inner life everyone else’s burden. Their words were painful because they did not merely identify flaws that I had never seen. They named realities I had recognized since high school but had never learned to manage consistently.

Supernatural Healing Can Begin With Exposure

I despaired when those weaknesses came into the light. I told God that there was no possible way I could fix all the instability, anxiety, anger, and emotional reactivity inside me. My faults had surfaced only two weeks into the program, and I could no longer hide behind education, calling, gifting, or potential. Yet the exposure that felt like rejection became the beginning of healing.

The elders corrected me, but they did not discard me. They named serious flaws without reducing my entire identity to those flaws. They did not remove me from the program, keep me at a safe distance, or treat my weakness as an inconvenience. Instead, they stayed close enough to demonstrate that correction and belonging could exist in the same relationship.

That experience felt new and strange because I had often interpreted correction as rejection. This time, love remained present while the truth was being spoken. Despite my humiliation, I stayed in the residency, and something surprising began happening in my soul. God started touching places that I had assumed would always remain broken.

I was not suddenly transformed into a different personality. The wounds, vulnerabilities, and areas of instability did not disappear overnight. Nevertheless, I began to recognize genuine change, increased steadiness, deeper self-awareness, and more freedom from automatic reactions. I am not where I should be, but by the supernatural grace of God, I am no longer where I was.

God Gave Me a Handyman Business

God’s lessons in humility and suffering were not finished. There was one vocational path I had sworn I would never take: starting my own construction business. I wanted to leave construction behind and move into teaching, preaching, theology, and recognized ministry. I wanted a life that matched the calling as I understood it.

When circumstances at work deteriorated, I eventually had to resign. The only realistic option in front of me was starting my own business, but I would not even begin as an electrical contractor. Instead, I became a handyman. In the invisible hierarchy of construction culture, this felt like God had moved me toward the bottom rather than promoting me toward the top.

Architects, engineers, and owners occupy the noble and royal level of that imaginary hierarchy. General contractors function like local governors, while tradespeople navigate the politics of the job site and pretend they do not care about those politics. Electricians obviously represent the most noble trade, and I offer that observation with complete objectivity. Somewhere beyond the plumbers, carpenters, mechanical contractors, and drywall crews stands the handyman—the person everyone feels qualified to tease.

God, in his subtle way, appeared to say, “That is what you are going to do.” Becoming a handyman was not one of my goals, and it did not fit the plan I had constructed for my future. Even now, although I have accepted the work, enjoyed parts of it, and watched God use it for ministry, I would probably put it down quickly if he released me from it. So far, he has not.

The Supernatural Calling of God Often Leads Downward

Once again, God invited me downward. He was not leading me downward into uselessness or meaningless shame. Instead, he was leading me into a place where obedience no longer needed to be decorated by my preferences. He was asking whether I would follow him when faithfulness did not resemble the future I had imagined.

God is not as interested in preserving our preferred image of ourselves as we are. He is not cruel, but he is also not sentimental about the identities we build from status, titles, intelligence, gifting, education, or public recognition. He knows how much pride can mingle with our sense of calling. He also knows how easily we confuse being used by God with being seen by people.

The supernatural calling of God therefore involves more than discovering what we are supposed to do. It also involves becoming the kind of people who can carry God’s presence, authority, gifts, and responsibility without using them to feed our insecurity. Supernatural ministry without humility can damage both the minister and the people being served. Consequently, God may spend years developing our character before entrusting us with the influence we requested.

For more conversations about spiritual formation, calling, and the work of the Holy Spirit, readers can explore Fresh Ground Theology articles on supernatural Christian life. They can also visit the Fresh Ground Theology podcast archive for longer theological discussions. These links should be adjusted to match the exact categories and URLs used on the website. Keeping them near relevant passages will help readers discover related content naturally.

Jesus Shows Us the Way Down

Jesus taught that the way up in the kingdom of God is down. Christians readily agree with this teaching because we are often skilled at affirming doctrines we have not yet been required to live. Most of us consider ourselves reasonably humble until God applies humility to the specific places where our pride lives. At that moment, an inspiring doctrine becomes an uncomfortable personal invitation.

I wanted greatness, but God gave me hiddenness. I wanted ministry, but God gave me people to serve before giving me the role I wanted. I wanted to prove that I was ready, but God showed me how much still needed healing. I wanted to preach about humility, while God required me to practice it.

Philippians 2

Philippians 2 calls believers to possess the mind of Christ. Jesus existed in the form of God, yet he did not exploit his equality with God for his own advantage. Instead, he emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and humbled himself even to death on a cross. BibleProject offers an excellent overview of Philippians and the call to embody the story of Jesus, while a recent BibleProject and STREETLIGHTS collaboration explores humility during suffering and hardship.

This passage is so familiar that we can miss how astonishing it is. Jesus did not humble himself because he had forgotten his identity or doubted his relationship with the Father. He humbled himself because he knew exactly who he was. Secure identity did not make him grasp for status; it freed him to serve.

John 13

John’s Gospel presents the same truth through another scene. Jesus knew that he had come from the Father, that he was returning to the Father, and that the Father had placed all things into his hands. With that knowledge, he rose from supper, took a towel, and washed his disciples’ feet. Because Jesus knew who he was, he could take the lowest place without fear that the lowest place would redefine him.

Humility Is Not the Denial of Calling

I often approach service in the opposite way. I want to secure my identity before I serve, and I want enough affirmation, certainty, and visible evidence to prove that my life matters. Only after receiving those assurances do I feel prepared to take the lower position. Jesus, however, did not need the room to recognize him before he picked up the towel.

Biblical humility does not require us to deny a genuine calling, pretend that spiritual gifts do not exist, or reject what God has spoken. Humility means that we stop using our calling to protect our ego or demand a preferred outcome. We can believe that God has called us while remaining willing to serve wherever he places us. We can pursue supernatural ministry without believing that ordinary work is beneath us.

A handyman business and a ministry calling are not necessarily competing realities. God can reveal his presence on a job site, in a customer’s home, during a repair, or through a conversation that would never happen inside a church building. The kingdom of God is not restricted to platforms, pulpits, conferences, or podcast studios. When we remain sensitive to the Holy Spirit, ordinary work can become the setting for supernatural compassion, discernment, encouragement, prayer, and witness.

The Formation Was Not an Interruption

A text message I should not have sent became part of my formation. A meeting in which my flaws were named became part of my formation. A job I did not want, a title I did not receive, and a trade I once considered beneath me all became part of my formation. These experiences did not interrupt God’s plan for my life, because they were among the primary instruments through which he carried out that plan.

I am still not very good at humility. I still want to appear more impressive than obedient, and I sometimes want humility to feel noble while I am experiencing it. That desire is simply another way of wanting humility without humiliation. Thankfully, God has been kind enough not to leave me alone with that contradiction.

The supernatural calling of God has not disappeared from my life. I still believe God calls people, speaks through the Holy Spirit, opens doors, gives spiritual gifts, heals wounded places, and leads us into work prepared for us. However, I no longer believe supernatural calling can be measured only by visibility, rapid advancement, or public ministry. Sometimes the clearest evidence of God’s supernatural work is a proud person becoming teachable, an unstable person becoming steady, or an ambitious person learning to serve.

Perhaps the way up really is down. Perhaps hiddenness is not abandonment, correction is not rejection, and ordinary labor is not the enemy of sacred calling. Perhaps God is doing more in the seasons we resist than we will understand until much later. The God who calls us is also the God who forms us, and he loves us too much to fulfill our calling while leaving our character untouched.

A Prayer for Humility and Calling

Father, thank you that your calling does not depend on my ability to force doors open. Teach me to recognize your supernatural presence in both dramatic encounters and ordinary acts of obedience. Expose the pride, insecurity, and ambition that distort my understanding of ministry. Give me the mind of Christ so that I can serve without constantly needing to be seen.

Holy Spirit, make me sensitive to your voice and faithful in the place where you have planted me. Heal the wounded and unstable places in me that could burden the people I hope to serve. Help me receive loving correction without treating it as rejection. Form my character until I can carry your gifts with humility, courage, wisdom, and love.

Jesus, teach me to take up the towel. Remind me that I do not need a title to belong to you or a platform to participate in your kingdom. Make my work, ministry, relationships, suffering, and hidden obedience available to you. May your supernatural calling be fulfilled in my life according to your wisdom, your timing, and your glory.

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