7 Ways to Know God's Calling You by Tricia Goyer - IDENTITY NETWORK

7 Ways to Know God's Calling You by Tricia Goyer

IDENTITY NETWORK

If you're waiting until you have enough time or more money to answer God's call, read this.

There is a myth today that says we must get our life organized and in order before we follow God's call. Our kids must have adequate time with us. Our debt must be paid down. Our days must have space ... and peace.

After all, how can we do great things for God when we don't even have time to spend 10 minutes in prayer? How can we give from an empty well? How can we spare what we don't have, whether it be time, money or energy? Yet God's call never waits for us to unclutter our lives. In fact, He usually calls us when we have nothing to spare. Why?

When we don't have anything to give, we look to the Giver.

When we have no time, we must readjust our priorities and set things according to God's schedule.

When we feel foolish and inadequate, we'll look to God's wisdom.

When we feel wrung out, we'll look to His strength.

And in the midst of following Him, we'll find Him.

When John and I were busy with careers and older kids, God called us to adopt. When I was a busy homeschooling mom and writer, He called me to help start a crisis pregnancy center.

When our family was settled in Montana, God called us to Arkansas - and to an inner city church.

When I had not a moment to spare with book deadlines and kids, He's continued to call me to serve and inspire teenage moms through our Teen MOPS support group.

Even last week, when I had family visiting and a book deadline, God called John and me to help a teen mom move her and her kids. She was blessed. We were blessed too.

And what Have I Discovered?

More time? (Not really.)

More energy? (I wish!)

Instead, I've discovered that when I do God's work, He takes care of mine (the deadlines get met, the kids get cared for).

Yes, the words for the books and blogs come when I'm too tired to think. And my children are trained on what following God looks like.

Something else happens too. Lives are transformed. Children without a home find one. Young women who don't know what being a mother means are mentored. Some of these young women in crisis even bow their heads and pray for salvation. (I got to experience that recently!)

How Do You Know what God's Calling You to Do?

(Notice I didn't say IF He's calling.) Here are seven ways:

• There's a burden on your heart you can't shake.
• There is a specific person you know of who needs your help.
• The Scripture passage that you read encourages you to have faith and step out.
• When you pray, you have a sense that God is asking you to act.
• You don't have time, but you have a seed of faith.
• God brings someone into your life to encourage your calling (your spouse, your pastor, a godly friend.)
• You feel as if you can't do it alone.
• 
  

There are many things that can occupy our time - there always will be. There are good things we can devote our lives to, but the most important things are the God things.

When you do decide to step out, your schedule won't automatically clear. It never does. Instead, God will show up. He will give you extra wisdom, energy, resources and strength. But mostly He will give you Himself!

And when you have Him, you have everything. And when you give others the knowledge of Him, they can have Him too. And when lives around you are transformed, all the stuff you were busy with doesn't seem as important any more.

And God is glorified because it'll be clear to everyone that it's Him doing the work!

How about you? What do you feel God calling you to? What are you doing about it?

Prayer

Father God, You have blessed me with so much. Thank You for the unique life You have given me. Help me manage my time and resources wisely. Guide me as I look to what You are calling me to do and give me the strength and wisdom to fulfill my purpose.

Tricia Goyer

www.triciagoyer.com

Go here to read more articles by Tricia Goyer.

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Michael Snyder - Los Angeles Police Urge Residents ‘To Protect Themselves’ As Violent Crime Skyrockets - THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

Los Angeles Police Urge Residents ‘To Protect Themselves’ As Violent Crime Skyrockets

Posted: 01 Feb 2016  Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

All over America, rates of violent crime are absolutely soaring.  As you will see below, violent crime overall shot up by 20 percent in Los Angeles last year, and the police are telling people that “they need to be able to protect themselves” because the police may not be able to get there in time when they call.

Thanks to deep budget cuts, police departments across the nation are already severely undermanned, and our major cities are now seeing crime rates increase at a pace that we have not seen in ages.  In a previous article, I encouraged my readers to focus on the five basics of preparation – food, water, shelter, energy and self-defense.  Of those five, it is often self-defense that is the most neglected.  When bad people break into your house in the middle of the night intending to do bad things, what are you going to do?  Many of us have not had to think about that for a long time, but now conditions are rapidly changing in America.

If you don’t believe me, perhaps you will believe the head of the union for the LAPD.  According to him, people living in L.A. “need to be able to protect themselves” because the police “can’t guarantee we’re going to get there in time to help you”…

“The citizens need to know they need to be able to protect themselves because if they call 911, we can’t guarantee we’re going to get there in time to help you,” says Police Protective League President Jamie McBride.
He told Paige that Thursday morning between 5:30 and 10 a.m., there were just three patrol cars assigned to the West LA division. Two cars to protect more than 200,000 people in a 65 square mile radius.
“West Los Angeles, at the minimum, should have seven patrol units, two-man units working,” McBride said.

Have you ever been to Los Angeles?

I have, and even in the best of times it can be quite a mean place.

And of course these are not the best of times.  In fact, the overall rate of violent crime in the city was up by 20 percent last year…

Crime is up across the board in the nation’s second-largest city.
Statistics released Wednesday by the Los Angeles Police Department show that homicides and rapes are each up 9 percent and that robberies are up 13 percent. Violent crime overall increased by 20 percent.

Perhaps you are tempted to think that L.A. is just an anomaly.

Well, let’s go from the second largest city in the country to the third largest city in the country.

There were 51 homicides in Chicago last month, which was the highest total for the city in at least 16 years.  Sadly, this is just a continuation of a trend that has been going on for quite some time.  The following comes from USA Today…

Chicago routinely records more homicides annually than any other American city, but the grim January violence toll marks a shocking spike in violence in a city that recorded 29 murders for the month of January last year and 20 murders for the month in 2014. In addition to the jump in killings, police department said that it recorded 241 shooting incidents for the month, more than double the 119 incidents recorded last January.
The rise in violence comes after the Chicago Police Department reported 468 murders in 2015, a 12.5% increase from the year before. There were also 2,900 shootings, 13% more than the year prior, according to police department records.

Some of the crimes that I have been seeing in the news lately are almost too horrible for words.  If reading about acts of violence deeply troubles you, then you might want to stop reading this article right now.  I want to share with you something that recently happened in New York City, and it is the kind of stuff that nightmares are made out of…

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday denounced the rape of a woman by five men at a Brooklyn playground, pledging police would work to swiftly apprehend the suspects in “this vicious crime.”
Police said on Saturday the men took turns raping the 18-year-old woman at the playground operated by the New York City Parks Department in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn just after 9 p.m. on Thursday. One man pointed a gun at the father and told him to leave, police said.
After the father left, the men each assaulted the woman, police said. They fled when her father returned a short while later, accompanied by two officers.

One rapist is bad enough, but how do five young men come together and decide that they are going to randomly rape someone?

To do something so despicable your heart has got to be hard as a stone.

What in the world has happened to the morality of our society?

And to me, one of the biggest questions of this entire story is why the father decided to walk away from his daughter.

If I was in the same position, I would have stood my ground.  Maybe those young men would have shot me, but there is no way that I would have ever let them have my daughter.  They would have had to go over my dead body to get to her.

But this is what we are told to do today.  We are told to let the criminals do whatever they want and then call the police.

Unfortunately, now the police are openly telling us that they probably won’t be able to get there in time to do any good.

As the economy slows down, crime rates are going to go even higher.  When unemployment and poverty rise, people get desperate, and desperate people do desperate things.
We all need to start thinking about how we are going to protect ourselves and our families during the hard times that are coming.  Different people have different methods that they prefer, and that is okay.  But we are all going to have to start taking security a lot more seriously.

The Rate Hike Stock Market Crash Has Thrown Gasoline Onto An Already Raging Global Financial Inferno - MICHAEL SNYDER THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

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The Rate Hike Stock Market Crash Has Thrown Gasoline Onto An Already Raging Global Financial Inferno Posted: 20 Dec 2015 If the stock market crash of last Thursday and Friday had all happened on one day, it would have been the 7th largest single day decline in U.S. history.  On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 367 points after finishing down 253 points on Thursday.  The overall decline of 620 points between the two days would have been the 7th largest single day stock market crash ever experienced in the United States if it had happened within just one trading day.  If you will remember, this is precisely what I warned would happen if the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.  But when news of the rate hike first came out on Wednesday, stocks initially jumped.  This didn’t make any sense at all, and personally I was absolutely stunned that the markets had behaved so irrationally.  But then we saw that on Thursday and Friday the markets did exactly what we thought they would do.  The chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, David Rosenberg, is calling the brief rally on Wednesday “a head-fake of enormous proportions“, and analysts all over Wall Street are bracing for what could be another very challenging week ahead. When the Federal Reserve decided to lift interest rates, they made a colossal error.  You don’t raise interest rates when a global financial crisis has already started.  That is absolutely suicidal.  It is the kind of thing that you would do if you were trying to bring down the global financial system on purpose. Surely the “experts” at the Federal Reserve can see what is happening.  Junk bonds have already crashed, just like they did in 2008.  The price of oil has crashed, just like it did in 2008.  Commodity prices have crashed, just like they did in 2008.  And more than half of all major global stock market indexes are already down at least 10 percent for the year so far. You don’t raise interest rates in that kind of an environment. You would have to be utterly insane to do so. The Federal Reserve has thrown fuel onto a global financial inferno that is already raging, and things could spiral out of control very rapidly. As far as this upcoming week is concerned, we have now entered “liquidation season”.  Investors are going to be pulling their money out of poorly performing hedge funds before the end of the calendar year, and as CNBC has pointed out, more hedge funds have already failed in 2015 than at any point since the last financial crisis… Liquidation season occurs when clients of poorly performing hedge funds ask for their money back. It tends to occur at the end of a quarter or year. In response, hedge funds must sell stocks in the open market to raise the money that needs to be returned to investors. That means if a hedge fund performed poorly this year; it is probably flooded with liquidation requests right now. In fact, there have been more failed hedge funds this year than any time since 2008. The dominoes are starting to fall.  We have already seen funds run by Third Avenue Management, Stone Lion Capital Partners and Lucidus Capital Partners collapse.  Amazingly, there are some people out there that are still attempting to claim that “nothing is happening” even in the midst of all of this chaos. As they say, “denial” is not just a river in Egypt. And this crisis is going to get even worse as we head into 2016.  Egon von Greyerz, the founder of Matterhorn Asset Management, is convinced that we will soon see “one disaster after another”… Greyerz predicts, “I think we will have one disaster after another, first in the junk bond market, then inemerging markets and, after that, the subprime markets. Subprime car loans and student loans I see as another massive problem area. It is going to be one thing after another that will unravel. Since 2008, when the world almost went under, we have printed or increased credit by 50% or by $70 trillion, and the world economy is still struggling to survive. I think the real change in confidence will come down when markets come down. . . . I think things will come down very quickly.” And I think that he is right on target.  The global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and when one financial institution fails, it inevitably affects dozens of others.  And the failures that we have already seen are already spreading a wave of fear and panic that may be difficult to stop.  The following comes from Business Insider, and I think that it is a pretty good explanation of what we could see next… Funds such as Third Avenue and Lucidus close, liquidating their portfolios. Investors, spooked by the closures and the risk that they might not be able to get their money out of these funds, make a rush for the exits while they still can. That creates even more selling pressure. Funds sell the assets that are easiest to sell as they look to reduce risk, which pushes the selling pressure from the risky parts of the market to the higher-quality part of the market. Things evolve from there. If you have been waiting for the next financial crisis to arrive, you can stop, because it is already unfolding right in front of our eyes. The only question is how bad it is going to become. In the final analysis, I find myself agreeing quite a bit with Charles Hugh Smith, the author of “A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All“.  He believes that the ridiculous monetary policies of the Federal Reserve have played a primary role in setting the stage for this new crisis, and that now this giant financial “Death Star” that they have created “is about to blow up”… By slashing rates to zero, the Fed ruthlessly eliminating safe returns for savers, pension funds, insurers and the millions of people with 401K retirement nesteggs. In effect, the Fed-Farce has pushed everyone into risk assets–and then played another Dark Side mind-trick by masking the true dangers of these risky assets. As oil-sector debt blows up, as junk bonds blow up, and emerging markets blow up, we are finally starting to see the real costs of going over to the Dark Side of endless credit expansion and throwing the gasoline of near-zero interest rates on the speculative fires of financialization. The Fed’s hubris has led it to the Dark Side, and now its Death Star of impaired debt, phantom collateral, speculative frenzy and bogus mind-tricks is about to blow up. Personally, instead of saying that it “is about to blow up”, I would have said that it is already blowing up. We have already seen trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth wiped out around the world. Energy companies are failing, giant hedge funds are going under, and the 7th largest economy on the entire planet has already plunged into “an outright depression“. Everyone that warned of financial disaster in the second half of 2015 has been proven right, but this is just the beginning.  Now that the Federal Reserve has thrown gasoline onto the fire, our problems are only going to accelerate as we head into 2016. So for the upcoming year, let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.