MGAML, I see your point of view, and no I don’t think it’s wrong at all to seek and discern to find out if God maybe does want more or different of you than you’re doing or giving at the moment. And I’m sure you’re doing that already.
Just remember that God doesn’t judge success in life the way we frail humans do. So what looks best or biggest to us may not actually be what God wants of us. Sometimes he actually DOES want that racehorse to plod along at 2 miles an hour.
And I’ll give you two examples to illustrate what I mean. The first is Christ himself. There is literally nothing he couldn’t have done or been. The greatest politician, the most brilliant scholar, greatest king, the greatest warrior, the richest, the handsomest, the strongest, the longest-lived person there has ever been.
What was the Father’s will for him instead? Humble status if not outright poverty. Obscurity. Ignominy. 30 years of patient preparation and quiet living before he even began his ministry, although he seems to have been ready at 12.
A short life and a violent and miserably lonely death. Constant harassment from his opponents. Disciples who largely misunderstood him because his teaching, while profound, wasn’t designed first and foremost to really tickle the ears or the mind the way Plato or Aristotle does, although he certainly had the ability to do so if and when he wanted. A fate so difficult that even he begged the Father to bring His ends about some other way if possible. And yet what glory, what nobility, and what supreme happiness there must have been in it as well!
The second example is Francis of Assisi. His family had a thriving business and were comfortably well off. Most of us in his situation would assume that we were called to take these advantages and do something with them, like the ‘good and faithful servant’ of the Gospels.
God’s will for Francis, however, was the opposite. Utter utter beggarly poverty. Working with lepers, who even he had loathed in his earlier life. The point is he had started out with big dreams, totally different to what he became, and the means to achieve them in all probability.
If anyone had told him at the beginning where he was going to end up he would have said, like you ‘if this is God’s way of blessing people, then He can keep it.’ Yet he WAS blessed, and was more truly HAPPY doing what he was meant to, and serving the poorest of the poor, than anywhere else.
There are kings and others who have had all the material and worldly success and gifts that anyone could desire and have been miserable all the days of their lives. Francis was the total opposite.
I’m not saying everyone is called to be a Francis or a Christ, nor to depress you with the thought. Just that none of us should discount the possiblity, don’t assume that ‘having a purpose’ necessarily means success in a material or worldly sense, or even a ‘big mission’ of any kind, and above all please don’t feel bad if you DON’T achieve such success or feel any elevated calling. Such considerations truly mean nothing in God’s eyes.
