Let me ask you something.
When you think about calling — your calling, specifically — what does the search feel like?
For most Christians I’ve talked with, it feels like looking for something. A missing piece. A hidden answer. A specific plan that God has already decided and is waiting for you to locate before your real life can begin. The language we use gives it away: finding your calling. Discovering your purpose. Uncovering God’s will. As if it’s buried somewhere, and you just haven’t dug in the right spot yet.
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I spent years in that search. Studied it academically. Taught it to HS students. Walked alongside leaders and young adults who were exhausted by it. And here’s the honest truth: I was exhausted by it too. This isn’t a journey I completed and am now reporting back from. I’m still on it. What I’m sharing with you in this space is what I’m learning as I go — the convictions that have taken shape through years of study, teaching, pastoral work, and my own persistent wrestling with what it means to live called.
One of those convictions arrived unexpectedly — on a movie set, of all places. (If you missed last week’s post, the short version: I was cast in a supporting role in a film, and the experience of working with a director and a cast all committed to a story together cracked open a metaphor that changed the way I understand calling entirely. You can read the full story here. But even if you haven’t, what follows should make sense on its own.)
The metaphor, simply put, is this: life with God is less like solving a puzzle and more like inhabiting a story. God is the Author and Director. We are characters in His epic — not passive recipients of a predetermined script, but genuine co-creators of our chapter within His larger narrative. The calling question isn’t what is the answer I need to find? It’s who is God developing me to be, and how do I show up faithfully in the scene I’m actually in?
That shift — from calling as puzzle to calling as story — is what this post is about. And I’m still learning what it means. I suspect we’ll be learning it together for a long time.
The puzzle model — and why it fails
Here’s how the puzzle model works, whether or not it’s ever named that way:
Your calling is a specific, fixed thing that exists somewhere apart from you. God knows what it is. Your job is to find it — through prayer, through assessment, through counsel, through enough spiritual sensitivity to finally hear what He’s been trying to say. Once you find it, you’ll have arrived. The searching will be over. You can finally start.
The problem is that this model quietly generates a set of beliefs that are very difficult to live with:
God is withholding the answer until I’m ready. So you work harder, pray more, try to become spiritually adequate enough to receive the guidance you’re looking for.
There is a right answer and a wrong answer. So every decision carries enormous weight. Every wrong turn might be a missed calling. Every season of confusion feels like failure.
The real thing is always somewhere ahead. So whatever season you’re in right now — the ordinary Tuesday, the unglamorous work, the season of hiddenness or transition or limitation — none of it quite counts. Real life starts when you find it.
I’ve watched this model quietly crush people who love God and genuinely want to follow Him. And I’ve felt its weight myself — the low-grade anxiety of never quite arriving, never quite certain, always one more assessment or one more prayer away from the answer that would finally make everything clear.
It didn’t come. And I gradually came to believe it wasn’t supposed to — because calling isn’t actually that kind of thing.
What if calling is a different kind of thing entirely?
What if calling isn’t a puzzle to solve? What if it’s a story to inhabit?
Think about what it means to enter a great story. You don’t stand outside it, analyzing it, trying to decode the hidden message before you’re allowed in. You step into it. You meet the characters. You follow the narrative. You discover who you are in relation to everything else that’s happening. The meaning emerges through participation, not prior to it.
This isn’t just a helpful metaphor. It’s actually a more theologically accurate account of how the Bible talks about calling. Abraham didn’t receive a comprehensive life plan — he received a direction and a promise and an invitation to walk. Moses didn’t get a flowchart — he got a burning bush and a next step. The disciples weren’t handed a five-year strategy — they were told follow me, present tense, right now, in this scene.
The calling that shows up in Scripture almost never looks like a puzzle being solved. It looks like characters being developed, roles taking shape, stories unfolding — in partnership with a God who is more present in the process than most calling frameworks suggest. And critically — in almost every case — the person being called didn’t have the full script in advance. They had the next step, a deepening relationship with the one calling them, and enough trust to keep walking.
That sounds a lot more like life as I actually experience it. Maybe it does to you too.
Five ways the story model changes everything
The difference between puzzle and story isn’t just philosophical. It’s practical. It changes how you live on an ordinary Tuesday.
Relationship, not formula. In the puzzle model, you’re trying to crack a code. In the story model, you’re deepening a relationship with the one who is writing the story with you — the Author who is also the Director, the one who entered His own story in Jesus and hasn’t left the set since. You stop mining assessments for (final) answers and start cultivating conversation with Him.
Dynamic, not static. The puzzle model implies a fixed answer waiting to be found — a similar answer in every season of life. The story model understands that your calling grows because your relationship with God grows. The character you are at forty is not the character you were at twenty — and neither is the expression of your calling. That’s not inconsistency. That’s development.
Process, not product. In the puzzle model, calling is a destination — the place you arrive when you’ve finally “figured it out.” In the story model, calling is the entire commitment, the whole journey of walking with the Director through His unfolding narrative.
A brief but important clarification here, because I don’t want to leave the wrong impression: none of this means calling is only ever vague, or that God never calls you to specific things. He does. Throughout Scripture and throughout life, God calls people to specific responses, specific roles, specific steps of obedience — and those calls deserve real discernment and a real response. The Live Called framework is designed to help you hear those calls more clearly and step into them more confidently, not to dissolve them into endless reflection.
The difference is this: those specific calls are waypoints in the journey, not destinations that end it. God calls you to this job, this community, this relationship, this season of service — and you respond, you step in, you live it fully. But that step doesn’t complete your calling any more than one scene completes a story. The character keeps developing. The next waypoint emerges as you faithfully inhabit the current one. Practical discernment, real decisions, specific next steps — all of that is very much part of what we’ll explore together in this space. The story model doesn’t make calling less practical. It makes it more honest about what calling actually is.
Way of being, not thing to have. The puzzle model makes calling something you possess — a label, a role, an answer you can finally write on your biography. The story model makes calling the way you move forward — in partnership with God, across every season, in every scene. You stop asking what is my calling? and start asking who is God developing me to be within His story?
Journey, not destination. The puzzle has an ending — you find the answer, and the search is over. The story, in contrast, never ends, because the story is still being written. Which means every season of your life — including the confusing ones, the painful ones, the ones that look like nothing is happening — is part of the story. Nothing is wasted. No scene is skipped.
I’m still learning to live these five contrasts. Some days the puzzle model pulls hard — the old anxiety about not having arrived, not having figured it out. But the story model keeps proving itself more livable, more theologically honest, and more consistent with how God actually seems to work in the lives of the people I know — including my own.
Most days I’m still learning what that looks like. But the question I keep coming back to — the one I’d invite you to sit with — is this:
What would change for you if you stopped trying to find your calling and started developing your character in partnership with the Director who is already in the scene with you?
You’re not solving a puzzle. You’re living a story.
And the story is already underway. We’re in it together.
