Confusing, Exhausting, and Overwhelming by Erin Fondren

God always has a plan. Often His plan is confusing, exhausting, and overwhelming. Looking back at the year in the Fellows program, I see how evident His hand was in each confusing, exhausting, and overwhelming moment. I worked as Program Assistant at Boosterthon Fun Run. Boosterthon proved to be the biggest blessing, while also being the greatest challenge. The role brought me so far outside of my comfort zone. I couldn’t begin to know how to crawl back into it. 

The family of Boosterthon was one of genuine love, compassion, and encouragement. While I felt that I wasn’t in my strengths during my internship, that did not stop the Boosterthon team from validating me as the person God made me to be. It is because of Boosterthon that I found my passion for people, and specifically students. I found a desire to use the school campus and community as my mission field. 

Boosterthon showed me what it means to be selfless and love others while showering them with God's love. It is because of my time there that I am now a school counselor, teaching character education every day. I will forever be thankful for the Booster family. So lean on the promise that God has designed every second for your best interest even when it is confusing, exhausting, and overwhelming. We need confusing, exhausting, and overwhelming to bring us back to surrender.

-Erin Fondren

The Freedom to Hope by Lani Short

Upon graduating from college, I had many questions about what my future held but few answers. For me, deciding a career path immediately held a lot of weight and left me feeling more defeated than encouraged. I lacked confidence in achieving the big plans that the Lord had placed in my heart. I believed that God may not come through for me. As a child, we are told to dream, “reach for the stars”, and get excited about becoming an independent adult; but college struck a different chord. The dreams ceased, and practicality set in.

In weekly Round Tables during the Fellows program, community members would come and share their lives with us over a meal. Some of these individuals were successful businessmen and women, influential leaders, entrepreneurs, and others who raised their family full-time. Hearing these stories week after week instilled hope in me, and I began to dream again.

There is power in testimony and encouragement in the way God works in others. It frees you, allows you to pray big, and shows you our Savior in a beautiful light.

God has put numerous promises and reminders in His Word and in your heart: promises for your future and reminders through your past. He was faithful then. Why wouldn’t he be faithful now? Just like the Israelites, we forget about His faithfulness in the past and constantly need reminders. And I mean constantly.

Psalm 62:5-8 says that our hope comes from resting in God alone as our rock and salvation. You are seated in heavenly places, co-heirs with Jesus, more than a conqueror in Christ, and complete in the way He made you. He has a plan for the future, but we must have HOPE. It isn’t a futile concept – our Father who showers us with His love mandates it. With more hope comes more intimacy with our Father. He is a giver, and as you press in and stop striving – the more you encounter His actual, tangible love.

Through the Fellows and hearing the way God worked, I found the freedom to hope for my future and have faith that my dreams aren’t too big for him to handle or fulfill – even when His answers look different than what I anticipated.  

That next year, I took a leap of faith and moved to Washington, D.C. to follow His call. It hasn’t been easy. But it is worth the adventure with my Father, the Creator. I don’t think this adventure equates to an easy life, but if He hasn’t let you down so far, He will continue to sustain you by His unending love.

“And these three remain: Faith, Hope, and Love. The strongest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13

A New Year, An Old Truth

Growing up, I watched cartoons every Saturday morning. My favorite was The Jetsons. With a flying car and a robot to do everything, it seemed like they had the good life on demand. At the time, 2018 was a lifetime away, and yet, here we are with more robots than we realize and our needs met at the touch of a button.

From The Jetsons to the twenty-first century, our lives and professions have advanced at an alarming rate. Yet one aspect of our daily lives remains unchanged. We may be living in “the future”, but our human nature has remained unchanged. We are still broken and searching, in need of that one thing that makes our lives free, purposeful, and more abundant―relationships.

And the ultimate relationship we were made for is the one with our Creator God.

All the artificial intelligence, the most brilliant computers, and our advanced knowledge will never discover another way to know God or experience grace than through a relationship with Jesus. The words of the apostle John are still true: "Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life.” (I Jn 5:12)

“We must cling to the truth when the world around us screams loudly in our ears.”

As we go into the second half of our Fellows year, we will be tempted to believe the lie that life can be found in the perfect job, the best relationship, or that instagramable apartment―not in the Creator God. We must cling to the truth when the world around us screams loudly in our ears. Jesus did the same when he was tempted in the desert in the Gospel of Matthew. (Mt 4:1-17)

Using God’s truth to navigate this world is not very “Jetson-like". It’s not robotic, or computer generated, or in video form. It doesn’t follow a checklist. It comes to us in the form of a relationship with Jesus, the Living Word. So if you want to know how to pray for the Fellows and myself in the upcoming months, pray God’s Word over us. Pray God’s Word for us.

We have several full months ahead of us. Pray with us as we walk into the second half of our program:

1. We have our Highlands Ability Battery weekend coming up in early February. Pray for insight into each Fellow’s individual gifts and passions.

2. We head to Chattanooga to volunteer with Hope for the Inner City at end of February.

3. The Fellows continue with professional development seminars, Roundtable discussions with members of the community, and investments in their church placement.

4. The Board and I are interviewing and putting together next year’s class. It’s going to be a busy Spring!

Want to learn more about the Fellows program in Charlotte or get involved? Reach out! I’d love to grab coffee and chat.

Thank you to all of you who pray and support us in so many ways. We are very thankful! As Paul David Tripp says, “We have not been left to secure our own future because God is grace has secured an end to our story more glorious than we can grasp.”

In Grace,

Connice

How God Uses Our Work for Spiritual Formation

This excerpt is adapted from Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work by Tom Nelson. 

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For many years I worked in a fast-food restaurant. I spent long hours waiting on difficult and demanding customers, dealing with conflict, managing employees, evaluating financial statements, and cleaning clogged toilets. Being young in my faith, I didn’t understand the importance of my work in contributing to my own spiritual growth. All too often I viewed my work as an obstacle to my spiritual growth. During those times when it was a real pain, I thought, You know, if it wasn’t for my work and the difficult people I work with, I could be a better Christian.

I now realize how wrong my thinking was. The people I worked with and the work I did were God’s providential pathway to nurture my spiritual growth, not to impede it.

Many times our work seems less than ideal. Who of us cannot relate to country singer Johnny Paycheck’s heartfelt words of exasperation, “Take this job and shove it”? We can be treated unfairly at work. We can face prejudice, abuse of power, harassment, and injustice. Merely because of our Christian faith we can be sidestepped for promotions or even lose our jobs. Clearly some of our greatest disappointments, struggles, and suffering in life occur in the context of our work. 

But is throwing in the towel the answer?

Detours are Purposeful

Dave is a friend who works in the highly competitive field of sports broadcasting. He is very good at his work and has crafted his vocational skill to a high level. His career has seen both highs and lows.

One of the low points occured in the final interview for a job he really wanted. The job would have meant wider network exposure, a big step in his career, and more generous provision for his family. While he was having dinner with the leaders of the company, he was asked what philanthropy he wanted to endorse as part of his broadcasting role in the community. When Dave mentioned his commitment and support for a nationwide nonprofit Christian sports ministry, the interview came to a screeching halt. His interviewers thanked Dave for coming and immediately asked for the dinner check. My friend had a long flight home knowing the job he’d wanted so badly and thought he’d secured was now gone.

Disappointments and discouragements are a part of every work experience, but they need not be seen as obstacles to God’s purposes in our lives. For the follower of Jesus, suffering—whatever its form—is one of God’s means for his formative work in our lives. Detours, difficulties, and delays are often some of the most transformative times in our journey of faith. Under the sovereign hand of God, suffering is not senseless; it is purposeful.  

Work Is for Spiritual Formation 

In Romans 5, Paul’s articulation and understanding of the gospel puts our suffering in proper perspective. God’s preferred path of transformation is not a path of ease, but it is one of enduring hope. As the apostle declares:

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Rom. 5:3–5) 

We must embed deeply in our hearts and minds that our work, though often filled with tribulations, is one of God’s main means for our spiritual growth and transformation. Work is where perseverance, proven character, and hope are forged in our lives.

When we face the formidable winds of workplace trials, rather than running from or becoming embittered by them, we would be wise to lean into them with trust and confidence, knowing that God has allowed them for a reason. Now, often this reason is not fully known by us. But through the eyes of faith, we find contagious joy and enduring hope. If we grasp the truth of God’s Word about our work, we can remain hopefully buoyant even in difficult job circumstances.

In The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases the apostle James’s inspired words in a way that I find very helpful: “Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides.” (Does that sound like your workplace?) He continues: 

You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way. (James 1:2–3)

As I look back at my life and vocational work, I see the truthfulness of these words. I now realize that some of the times of my greatest personal and leadership growth have been in the most difficult days. When my work has been the most demanding and when my inadequacy has been most inescapable, my spiritual growth has been most evident. As I have had to increasingly trust God for wisdom and strength in my work, my spiritual formation has trickled down into the depths of my heart, mind, and soul.

When we look at our work, we often look through the lens of our own personal fulfillment. Yet the New Testament writers look at it through the lens of our own spiritual formation, an outworking of our salvation and our sanctification. It is a good and desirable thing to have work that fulfills us. There’s nothing inherently wrong about pursuing a great job, but we must remember that it’s not necessary for God’s will to be accomplished in our lives. What is necessary is that we are formed into greater Christlikeness in our work.

If you are facing some really tough times in your work right now, don’t let the termites of discouragement eat away at your soul. Realize that God wants to use the difficulties you’re facing to forge greater Christlikeness and spiritual maturity in your life. Your work is not an obstacle to your spiritual growth; it’s a God-sized opportunity for you to grow. 

Why We Celebrate Labor Day: A Call to Remember the Dignity of Labor

The following post comes from Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s popular podcast The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. 

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As we go into the weekend and think of Monday, we are reminded that for over a 100 years we've had the holiday of Labor Day. We need to be reminded historically this holiday emerged from the great labor movement in the United States. That's a very important movement, and it played a very important role in American history. 

But what we're looking at right now with Labor Day is the fact that most Americans simply see it as a holiday. They're really not thinking about the dignity of labor, whether that's tied to the historic movement in America or to labor just in terms of the general human activity of work.

This is where Christians would rightly look at Labor Day as an opportunity to remember that labor is a reflection of the fact that we are made in God's image. The imago Dei, as the Scripture defines it, is the image of God in us. God made us in his image, and one crucial dimension of that image is the fact that we are made to work. 

Thus for Christians, work is never merely work. We come to understand that every Christian indeed has a vocation, which in its essence means a calling. Every one of us has the opportunity by the calling God gives to us to show God's glory in a fallen world in a way that can only be shown by the fact that made in his image, we work.

Work can be exhausting. Work can be tedious. Work can be tiring. But work always has an inherent dignity. One of the things that is clear from the Christian worldview is that even as Francis Schaeffer once said, "There are no little people and there are no little places," there are also no little jobs. 

Every job that makes a contribution to human civilization is a job that has dignity. And every worker should know the dignity of that work. In terms of the Biblical worldview, work is not itself a symptom of the fall. The fact that work is so difficult–-now that's a symptom of the fall. Adam was not told that as a result of his sin he would have to work; he was just told that his work was going to be far harder. 

The Bible affirms that in the truest possible sense we were made to work, and our work is a reflection of the fact that we are made in God's image. And thus our faithfulness in work should be seen as the fulfillment of a vocation, a calling that is given to every one of us.

We also as Christians then need to remember that a job is not always tied to a paycheck; it's not always tied to a job title. We come to understand that being a mother is also a vocation; that there are dimensions of human labor to the glory of God that will never have a job description and will never have a title. And for Christians, Labor Day should afford us the opportunity for reflection on the Biblical command that in all things we are to do all things to the glory of God. 

So as you gather together with friends and family for Labor Day, you might have a picnic. But just remember: life wasn't supposed to be a picnic. We were made for work and until Christ comes, that work is to his glory.