Unique Conformity

I am really struggling with "my calling", my vocation...what I am supposed to do in life.  I keep asking God for what He wants from me and for me, and the prayer seems to hit a wall like the thick, steel fortresses of bank vaults, and then just fall flat. 

I think part of my problem is that I really want to be unique.  I think it may even be part of the messaging I was given as a kid, and it is for sure the very societal climate I live in right now.  Everyone, it seems, wants their 20 minutes of fame - of uniqueness - so we will douse the internet and other social media with pictures, songs, videos, words...just to see if anything will go viral (and make us stand out from the other 7.139 billion humans also residing on this planet.)

But what if uniqueness is not God's goal for us?  (Though I am pretty sure I've heard that as a well developed theology from many pulpits.)  What if God called me to be a farmer.  There are plenty of other farmers in this country and around the world.  Most of them are not growing unique crops, but rather the bulk of the same food sources for the rest of those planetary residents.  

To plant, to tend, to grow, to harvest the same thing season after season seems utterly boring to me...but my mouth doesn't think so.  The mundane season after season job is not really glamorous....but when the smell of delicious food fills my kitchen, it has a hint of glamour to it.

What if God called me to motherhood?  Like the farmer, there are millions of maternal types across this terrestrial ball.  They too are called to plant, tend, grow, and harvest in the lives of their children and community.  They too have a mostly mundane and tedious job....but not when I come in contact with a young man who, in kindness, holds the door open for me.  Moms around the world do a lot of the same jobs together.  We cook, clean, listen, encourage, heal, discipline, push, and hug, to name a few.  There is nothing unique about those things...until I meet a teenage girl who can carry on a delightful conversation with another adult.

God has called me to motherhood.  And it is boring and long and really not glamorous.  I would really like to go get a job where I get noticed, make an instant difference, and receive bonuses.  Instead, I get to tell my kids a million times to make their beds, and attempt, in this electronic age, to keep what is being seen on screens (tv, computers, phones) monitored.  I get to have those I work with roll their eyes at me and grab for everything they want while forgetting what I've done for them.

There is no uniqueness, per se, in what I do.  It is simply the daily tasks of mothering.  Then again, maybe God's calling on my life is not to be unique.  Maybe His calling is to be faithful, to love, to endure suffering, to take a servant's posture, to think more of others than we think of ourselves....hmmmm....to be conformed to the image of His Son, Jesus.

Maybe conformity is my calling.  And I'll leave the uniqueness to Him.