Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Latter Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we're living in. Today, I want to talk about calling. We often hear people say, "God called me to do this or that." What does that mean? Does everybody have a calling? And if so, how do we find it? The reality I see is that most people just go with the flow. They take life as it comes and do what's on the agenda for that day, and that's about it.

Quite frankly, for a believer, that way of life is unacceptable because this is no ordinary time in history. And the Commander in Chief is looking for who among His children have ears to hear the calling that He has for them. Today, I want to first define what the Bible means by calling. Number two, I want to tell you what happened to me in 2012 when God called me to fly—as in to become a pilot when I was in my 60s.

Third, how that calling was instrumental in what I'm doing now helping others navigate these latter days. And finally, I want to share five coaching points that I hope will help you hear the personal calling that God has for you to come up higher. Let me first explain why this is important. First, if God has a unique calling for you, it's critical that you know it so that you can be busy doing that when the Day of the Lord comes.

Secondly, sometimes God uses individuals and their callings as important signs in and of themselves. This series is all about helping us spot the signs of the latter days, and it just may be that you and your calling are one of those signs we are to learn from. Ezekiel 12 is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. God called the prophet to do some strange things.

He says, "In the sight of the people, you shall lift your baggage upon your shoulder and carry it out in the dark. You shall cover your face that you may not see the land, for I have made you a sign for the house of Israel." God called Ezekiel to act out certain things as a sign of what was coming. So that when people asked Ezekiel what are you doing, he was told by God to say, "I am a sign for you. As I have done, so shall it be done to you. You shall go into exile, into captivity."

Now, I'm telling you this because I believe that my call to fly in my 60s was a sign to me and to others. But I also want to suggest that some of you may be called likewise as a sign. I refer to this as an Ezekiel calling, where the details of what you are asked to do may have a deeper meaning, and that what you learn will become the curriculum you will teach as the times get worse. God told Ezekiel, "I have made you a sign."

The word sign is *mofeth*, which means a conspicuous omen—something that causes others to ponder and wonder. So what does it mean to have a calling? The word calling is biblical. It means the same in both the Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew word is *kara*. The Greek word comes from the root *kaleo*. Both of them mean to call aloud, to call one's name or call forth.

We find an early example in Exodus 3 when Moses was tending his father-in-law's sheep and he happened to see a bush that was strangely on fire but not being consumed. We read in verse four, "When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the midst of the bush." Now, this passage answers the question that you might have, which is, does everyone have a calling?

We see that God called to Moses when he turned aside to see the bush, not before. This is significant. God waits for us to make the first move. Moses saw something unusual, something God engineered to happen in his path that particular day. And he interrupted the work he was doing to pay attention. That's when he heard God call his name.

The Apostle Paul writes about calling in his first letter to the Corinthians in Chapter 1. He said, "Consider your calling, brethren. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."

The Greek word calling here is the word *klesis*, which means an invitation. God invites people to do something for Him when they have been humbled. Now, that fits Moses' situation. He was a nobody shepherd in a strange land without a flock of his own. Now, does this relate to you? Are you at a place where you feel adrift, rather unimportant in the whole scheme of things, but inside you have a hunger to be used by God? To know that God called you to do something for Him?

If that's you, then I believe God does have a calling for you, and all you need to do is tell Him that you would be honored to hear such a call. Now, once you've done that, the rest is up to God, and what He may call you to do is unimaginable. Let me tell you the story of when God called me to learn to fly. It was the fall of 2012. I was living in a suburb of Atlanta after my 9/11 disaster of losing almost everything.

I was going through my usual routine of walking through the neighborhood and praying when suddenly I began to hear airplanes flying overhead. My eyes and ears were drawn to the sky, and this went on day after day, week after week. Now, being a composer, my ears are sensitive, so it was the sound of the engines that first drew me. I finally asked, "Lord, what does this mean? Why am I hearing airplanes all the time? Do you want me to learn to fly?"

Now, that question may seem a little out there, but my dad had a small plane and we flew places as a family during my growing up years. And I had recently discovered that my mother had earned her pilot's license at age 16. So maybe it was my DNA just waiting to kick in. I don't honestly know. But the more I talked to the Lord about it, the more excited I became at the thought of flying.

Coaching point number one: when you imagine yourself doing something and it excites you, take the next step and ask God for confirmation. The first confirmation for me came in a dream in which I saw myself walking along a path, and suddenly the path went straight up. Now, I'm not talking about a gentle slope, but perpendicular, 90 degrees up. The dream consisted of me trying to figure out how in the world to walk up this path. I couldn't maneuver at all. I was absolutely stuck, and I woke up exhausted.

After breaking out the dream using the Hebraic principles that I have learned, this is what the Lord spoke to my spirit: "You asked me to confirm why you keep hearing planes. I'm calling you up. I have lessons for you to learn that you will later teach. The only way my people are going to make it in the days ahead is to see things as I see from above. There are lessons I have to teach you to help others navigate in the days ahead."

Now, I can't tell you the sense of adventure that God put in my spirit that day. So in the fall of 2012, I began my journey in aviation. I was the only woman in ground school and the flight school's oldest student pilot. Now, to say I was outside my comfort zone is an understatement. I didn't grow up tinkering with cars. I knew nothing about engines, carburetor systems, how airplanes fly, the laws of aerodynamics, weather systems, air traffic control, or how to get from point A to B. Nada. Nothing.

For over a year, I studied, trained, and stretched myself beyond imagination. I can't count the number of internal battles I fought along the way—incredible fear, doubting myself, wrestling to understand concepts I had never been exposed to before. I battled medical issues with the FAA that threatened to blackball me. My instructor got fired, and on and on. I questioned this calling inside and out, and yet something inside kept telling me, "This is your path. Keep going. You'll understand it in time."

At long last, I passed the FAA written exam and my check ride and officially became a private pilot in December of 2013. That was quite a day. Now, I'm sharing this story because understanding parts of our calling often take a long time to learn. I didn't just wake up one morning and hear a voice say, "You're going to become a pilot, and you're going to fly to and from Washington, DC." No, I didn't hear the whole picture. I only heard the first thing: the sound of small planes flying overhead day after day.

Coaching point number two is this: God will not take you beyond where He spoke to you at first. He waits for action on your part. You see, there is a sequence to the unfolding of one's calling. If Moses had missed the appointment at the burning bush, he would never have ended up in front of Pharaoh to deliver God's people.

Let's bring this point down to earth. If something happened in the past where you thought God was leading you to do something and you ignored it, very likely your life has gone nowhere since that time. A good friend once told me about an epiphany he had where the Lord clearly revealed to him something he was to do, and he did not act on it. He just kept pondering. So for the next month, life went sideways. He had been top salesman the month before, and the next month he sold zip. God was getting his attention.

So he went before the Lord and he waited in silence. And revelation finally came: he had not acted on the initial leading. My friend had to repent for not going forward as he had been instructed to do. In my case, I also had the choice to do nothing. But I chose to go see the flight schools in my area and inquire about the cost and the time commitment necessary to learn to fly. Once I took these initial steps and still sensed the green light inside me, my next step was to register for the ground school and begin to take flying lessons.

Coaching point number three is you have to pay the price for your calling. When I heard the planes overhead, never in a million years did I envision owning an airplane. But along the journey, God kept pressing me to invest. It wasn't easy. First came the flying lessons, which are not cheap. And then realizing that He wanted me to be able to come and go whenever He directed, I couldn't just keep renting a plane. That did not make sense to me.

Now, transitioning in my head from being a student pilot to an airplane owner did not happen overnight. My faith had to be stretched. Over the next two years, I witnessed God's provision and His opened doors. In 2012 and '13, a series of investments did so well, it dawned on me that I had enough to purchase a small plane. Now, it was an older model, like me, but still had many miles left in it, as I trust that I have.

Now, did I have money for this plane when I began the journey? Hardly. But having come from losing almost everything I had in 2001, I can attest to God's faithfulness when it comes to financial provision. He is faithful to His word, for the Lord says in Luke 16, "He who is faithful in a little is faithful in much." When we are faithful with the little bit that we are given, He trusts us with more.

I knew then that I had been given this aviation training and this plane to steward somehow for His purposes. Now, I didn't fully know in the beginning where He had for me to fly. My only responsibility was to study to show myself approved and work out my calling with humility and integrity. Coaching point number four: when you have an assigned calling, you will see continual confirmation along the way.

In 2014, just a year after getting my pilot's license, God opened the door for me to become president of the nation's oldest organization for creative women, headquartered in Washington, DC. Now, very possibly one of the most difficult challenges I had was flying a small plane all by myself from rural Georgia all along the Appalachian Mountains into the most challenging airspace in the country.

I chose a small airport in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as my home base while I was in the DC area because it was less intimidating. But even then, I had to hire instructors there to teach me how to fly in and out of what's called the SFRA. That's the protected airspace that every pilot has to have legal clearance to fly in and out of. Not just anybody can fly around up there. The rules are very exact, so I spent a lot of time at the airport.

The flight school was operated, interestingly, by Israelis. I had an Israeli instructor, and we had some wonderful conversations when we flew. Now, he would often say to me, "You need to meet my roommate. You sound just like him. He is a rabbi who came from Israel for a few months and is learning to fly." One day I spotted the man that I assumed was the rabbi because he was wearing what's called *tzitzit*, which are the fringes that Orthodox Jews wear around their waist.

That was a puzzlement to me, and I just watched him from a distance the next few weeks, only to find out that he was in training for his first solo flight. Now, that got my curiosity up. So on one of my solo flights as I was getting ready to land, I asked the Lord for an opportunity to meet him. I was curious, given his age, why he was training to fly. I landed late in the afternoon and I walked into the small terminal, and who did I run into but the rabbi.

I walked over and introduced myself and asked, "Rabbi, I'd love to know why you are learning to fly." His voice resonated loudly across the terminal lobby and he said, "God called me to fly at age 68." I was speechless. I looked at him and I said, "God called me to fly too, in my 60s. I need to hear your story." Now, meeting this rabbi was not a coincidence. It was confirmation that God was pointing us both to something higher.

A Gentile and a Jew, both called specifically to learn to fly in our 60s. Now, what's up with that? I later discovered that the rabbi and his wife are Messianic believers who have a ministry in Eilat, the southernmost port in Israel on the Red Sea. The three of us spent a wonderful time together discussing our respective callings to fly, and he told me this. He said, "I believe the Lord is training me to learn to fly a jet so that I can be used to save my people as times get worse."

Now, he and I have lost touch over the years, but the significance to me then was one of confirmation that the Lord knows who are His. And He is calling some of us to do things we would never have imagined in preparation for the times we are living in. Today's final coaching point: what to do with your self-limitations. We all have them. But I want to remind you that you can do everything that God has called you to do.

How? Push through it. Push through your fear. Push through the doubts that you hear in your head. Push past the negative things people say about what you feel led to do. Most likely they have no sense of calling themselves, so pursuing yours only reminds them what they don't have. You're a threat to them. So what do you do with that? You move on. Not everybody is going to cheer you on. You want to seek out those who fly higher, who have pushed through tough challenges, and let them speak into your life.

In closing, one day I was talking with one of my spiritual daughters, and in the course of conversation, she hollered, "Wait a minute! What did you just say?" And I had to think a minute. I had no clue. What did I say? And after rethinking our conversation, what I said was, "I push myself pretty hard. I expect a lot from myself." She was quiet, and then she just said, "Wow. Wow." What kind of reaction was that? I then said, "Don't you expect a lot out of yourself?" She was quiet for a long time and then said, "I never even thought about that question."

This was an insightful moment for her and for me. I realized that she had been so maligned and abused all of her life, no one had ever come alongside of her and said, "I believe in you. You can do anything you set your mind to do and everything the Lord calls you to do." I knew then that God was giving me an opportunity to speak into her life. If this story rings true with you, please hear me when I say that God's specialty is choosing and calling those who have never flown before, metaphorically speaking.

If that's you, then I believe you have a tremendous assignment waiting for you. Listen for it. It's your calling. It may not be an airplane engine, but you will hear it. Consider your calling, as the Apostle Paul said. God looks for the least likely. If He were staring at a row of apples, He would bypass all the shiny red ones and choose the smaller one in the middle—the one with perhaps a bruise or two. That's the one He would call for a noble assignment.

Next time I'll share some of the incredible lessons I learned when I answered the call to come up higher. But in the meantime, I want you to think about what you sense He has called you to do. He is inviting you to participate in what He is doing now in the earth. And He's waiting for you to take that next step.

As always, you'll find this episode and all of my podcasts on my podcast page at candacelong.com. I invite you to take a look at my books, webinars, online store, and courses. They are all created to prepare you to navigate to the Kingdom safely. I want to thank you for being with me today, and I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Latter Days. God bless.