Helpful Tips for Your Calling

“To magnify our calling means to build it up in dignity and importance, to enlarge and strengthen it so as to let the light of heaven shine forth.

If we are to magnify our callings, we cannot live only for ourselves. As we serve with diligence, as we teach with faith and testimony, as we lift and strengthen and build convictions of righteousness in those whose lives we touch, we magnify the calling to which the Lord has entrusted us.  

President Henry B. Eyring said there are a few things we must come to know are true.

First, you are called of God. He knows whom He would have serve in every position in His Church. He chose you. He has prepared a way so that He could issue your call. Priesthood keys confer a right to revelation and through revelation comes in answer to prayer.  

Second, you are called to represent the Savior. Your voice to testify becomes the same as His voice, your hands to lift the same as His hands. That will be true even in the most ordinary tasks to which you are assigned and even in moments when you might be doing something that doesn’t appear to be connected to your calling.  Just the way you smile or the way you offer to help someone can build their faith.

There is a third thing that President Eyring said you need to know.  Just as God called you and will guide you, He will magnify you as well. You will need that magnification because each calling will bring opposition. You are doing the Lord’s work as His representative. He faced opposition, and the forces arrayed against you will try not only to frustrate your work but to bring you down.  When you do your calling with only your own power, you are inadequate. But you have access to far more than your natural capacities, and you don’t need to work alone.

We have all heard people say and even have said to ourselves, that our callings are wearing us out or that we don’t have time to serve. But magnifying our callings does not mean staying up all night preparing a lesson, handouts, and elaborate decorations.  The message of a good lesson comes through spiritual preparation and a focus on the principles of the gospel.  This also creates an interesting exchange of ideas through discussion, not through all the extra creative work that makes us so weary that we come to resent the time we spend in fulfilling our callings.

Brothers and Sister, I bear witness and testify that if we magnify our callings and listen to the spirit when He speaks to us, whether the sun is shining or the storm is raging, whether we feel the pain of defeat or the joy of victory, the sacred and eternal things of God will be brought closer.

I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

-President Chad Fitchner, Greenwich Branch