In preparation for an upcoming staff retreat, our Executive Pastor asked us to send her our StrengthsFinder results. If you’re not familiar with it, StrengthsFinder is an assessment tool – also called CliftonStrengths – developed by Gallup that identifies your top five natural talents out of 34 possible strength themes. The idea is that when you understand how you’re wired, you can lean into what you do best rather than spending all your energy shoring up weaknesses.
I knew I had taken the assessment before, so I dug through old computer files until I found the report. I read through my five strengths and immediately felt a disconnect. This doesn’t quite feel like me anymore. One or two of the categories felt off – like a sweater that used to fit but doesn’t quite anymore. Then I noticed the date on the report. It had been 18 years since I’d taken it.
Eighteen years.
I reached out and asked if she could send me a code to take the assessment again. She did. And when I got my new results, I was surprised – not because one or two strengths had shifted, but because all but one had changed entirely. As I read through the new report, something in me resonated. This is me. When I sent the results to our Executive Pastor, she replied playfully, “You’re a whole new person!”
I sat with that for a second, then typed back: “I think I just became me.”
There is a quiet pressure that builds in the lives of women in ministry leadership. It’s rarely spoken out loud, but most of us feel it. We watch what gets celebrated in our churches and organizations. We observe who gets promoted, whose ideas get traction, whose voice commands the room. And somewhere in the back of our minds, a conclusion starts to form: That’s who I need to be.
We begin to shape ourselves around a mold we didn’t choose – performing strengths we don’t actually have, suppressing the ones we do, contorting ourselves into a version of leadership that was never designed for us. And we wonder why we feel so tired.
But here’s the truth: When God knit you together in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13), He wasn’t following a pattern. He wasn’t cutting from the same template He used for the woman you most admire, or the leader who gets the most applause. He was making something original. Something only he could make. Ephesians 2:10 calls us His poiema – His masterpiece, His work of art, crafted by a creative God with specific good works already in mind.
A masterpiece isn’t a copy of something else. It’s one of a kind.
My 30 years in ministry have been a long and sometimes painful process of becoming me. I’ve learned through trial and error. Through seasons of effectiveness and seasons of burnout. Through slowly figuring out – often the hard way – what I was made for and what I wasn’t.
And here is why I think this matters so much, especially for those of us doing Kingdom work: The contribution you are called to make will only be fully realized if you are operating out of the self God actually created. Not the self you’ve constructed to fit the mold. Not the self you think other people need you to be.
The real you. The one God knit together.
So how do we get there? I won’t pretend to have a tidy formula, but I can share three things that have been most important in my own journey.
Discern What You’re Called To – And What You’re Not
In ministry, as in most professions, there’s an assumed trajectory. You advance. You take on more responsibility. You climb toward leadership tables with more influence. And I want to be careful here – there is nothing wrong with that path, and you may very well be called to it.
But I’ve come to believe that something matters more than advancement: fit. Specifically, your role fitting the thing God has actually wired you to do.
Twelve years into my time on staff at COMMUNITY Christian Church, I had been leading the Teaching Team for two years when I was invited to join the Executive Leadership Team. It was a significant moment – I was the first woman ever invited into that circle, and it felt important to step up and represent. So, I said yes. And I served in that role for five years.
But somewhere around year four, I started to feel it. A depletion I couldn’t quite explain. A scatteredness as I tried to juggle all that was on my plate. I began sitting with God and asking him honestly: Right now, here, where can I be of greatest use to your Kingdom?
The answer was clear. The Teaching Team. And the weight of Executive Leadership responsibilities was quietly eroding my ability to give my best there. I didn’t have enough time to study. Enough time to write. I was spread across too many things to do any of them with my whole self.
So, I made a decision that a lot of people around me found baffling. I stepped down from the Executive Leadership Team – but stayed on staff. I essentially demoted myself.
I’m not going to pretend that was always easy. There were moments when decisions I used to have a voice in were made without me. I wasn’t in the room where it happens. My ego noticed.
But here’s also what was true: I began to flourish in a way I hadn’t in years. I had the margin to bring my best to the ministry I was most uniquely suited to lead. And I had space – encouraged by our Lead Pastor – to pursue something I’d dreamed of for a long time. I wrote and published my first book, Choosing the Opposite.
Four years later, I can say with complete confidence that letting go of something I was not called to was one of the most important decisions of my ministry life.
Not every “no” is a failure. Sometimes it’s the most faithful thing you can do.
Protect the Rhythms That Lead to Your Flourishing
God bless them – I work with some incredibly driven people. They thrive on full calendars and back-to-back meetings. They seem genuinely energized by constant output. I admire them deeply.
I am not that person.
I am, at my core, a contemplative. I can sit in a chair, stare out a window, and get lost in a conversation with God for hours. That is not a discipline I have to force. It is simply how I’m wired.
But for a long time, I felt subtle pressure to function like the driven people around me. To fill the white space. To prove that I was just as productive, just as available, just as capable of running hard.
What I’ve learned – slowly, and sometimes through exhaustion – is that in order for me to flourish, I need space. Specifically, I need time in the morning for scripture, prayer, and journaling. And I need a weekly sabbath where I can linger with God unhurried and then do whatever sounds life-giving in the moment.
I’m not sharing this to sound more spiritual than anyone else. It’s actually less glamorous than that. It’s more like being the kid in the family who simply requires more one-on-one time with a parent to thrive. Other kids might be fine with 15 minutes. I need more. That’s just the truth about how God made me.
What I’ve stopped doing is apologizing for it. I’ve built the rhythms I need into my life, and I protect them – because when I don’t, I don’t just get tired. I stop being fully myself. And a depleted, diminished version of me is not what the Kingdom needs.
What rhythms does your flourishing require? Not the rhythms you think you should have. Not the rhythms that work for the person you most admire. Yours.
Build them. Protect them. Don’t apologize for them.
Speak Up for Yourself
This one took me the longest.
I have known so many women in ministry who are like me in this way: We work hard. We give our best. We do effective, faithful work. And then we wait. We wait for someone to notice. We wait to be invited. We assume that if we just keep doing good work, the opportunities we’re hoping for will eventually find their way to us.
Here is what I wish I could go back and tell my younger self: Most of the people you are waiting for aren’t thinking about you. Not because they don’t care – they do. They appreciate you. They’re grateful for your work. But they are not sitting around asking themselves, “What new opportunity could I create for her?” They have their own responsibilities, their own pressures, their own priorities. It is simply not their job to manage your calling.
That is your job.
So, ask for the opportunity you want to explore. Put your name in when you sense God stirring something in you. Articulate to your supervisor what lights you up and what depletes you. Don’t wait to be discovered. Show up and say, “I believe I have something to offer here.”
This is not pushiness. This is stewardship. It’s taking seriously the gifts God has placed in you and refusing to let them sit unopened because you were waiting for someone else to hand you permission.
As I read through my new StrengthsFinder report, I noticed something unexpected. What I saw wasn’t just a new version of me – it was the truest version of me. The woman who had been in there all along, slowly becoming more herself through thirty years of ministry, relationships, failure, growth, and grace.
She just needed some time to find herself.
And I think that’s the invitation for each of us. Not to reinvent ourselves. Not to perform a version of leadership that gets the most applause in the room we happen to be standing in. But to do the patient, sometimes difficult, always worthy work of becoming who we actually are.
Because that woman – the one God knit together with extraordinary care, the one He called His masterpiece, the one He equipped with a unique set of gifts for a specific set of good works – she is the one the church needs.
She is the one the world needs.
Become her.
