The Cause Within You: Finding the One Great Thing You Were Created to Do in This World

Discovering the Cause of a Lifetime

Alfred Lomas, a 40-something man with dark, deep-set eyes and tattoo-covered neck and arms, looks like a veteran of the streets.

In fact, from the time he was a teenager, Alfred was involved with gangs. His life took a detour when he joined the Marines and became part of an elite team that trained with Special Forces units around the world. After his release, Alfred returned to Los Angeles and resumed his relationship with one of the major gangs. Given his military training and expertise, he was not only involved in a lot of violence, but also in countersurveillance against the FBI, using many of the techniques he had learned overseas in covert ops. He worked directly for the relatively few gang leaders who were responsible for the majority of the violence that raged in the streets. He was responsible for protecting gang leaders, prostitution rings, drug sales and the like.

A major gang war broke out involving the Crips, the original street gang that now operates all over the world. Alfred was right in the middle of all of this. Not long ago, he told me that the two-and-a-half-square-mile area in downtown Los Angeles where that war raged had the highest murder rate in the country at that time. Alfred was the person responsible for introducing methamphetamines to the area, and he even got hooked on them. His life was a disaster. Eventually, he wound up in jail.

His case involved acts of police corruption, so it was thrown out of court. But with most of his cohorts still sitting in jail, either awaiting their trial or serving time, he had nobody to turn to. There were riots happening in the jail, so it was in lockdown, preventing him from making the contacts he needed to get access to money just to survive. Because it was such a volatile time, the other peple he knew who might have helped him had gone underground, leaving him broke and without the connections he needed.

Out of desperation, Alfred accepted an invitation to come to the Dream Center. He came hoping to get several hot meals and a few nights of decent rest. He ended up staying for a year.

During his time at the center, Alfred did more than break off his ties with his gang. He discovered the cause that restored dignity and meaning to his life. Today Alfred is involved in our food truck ministry, which distributes food to poor people. We hand out about 1 million pounds of food each week, for free, to poor people all over Los Angeles and to other churches who distribute it to people in their area. During the past three years or so, Alfred has been on the truck that serves people in the area he has lived and worked in all his life, the portion of the city where his gang and rival gangs terrorized people. While serving there, God impressed upon him the need to reach back into the gangs and get those people out of that life.

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Alfred came to the Dream Center just hoping to survive. Most people back then would have put the odds of his rebuilding his life—let alone helping formulate a solution to Los Angeles’ gang problem—as very low. And yet he has.

By now, I hope you realize that, just as certainly as God put a cause inside of Alfred, He has one for you. Let’s start at the beginning of the process. Once you realize that God has a cause just for you, how do you figure out what it is?

Having listened to a lot of people talk about their struggle to identify the cause within them, I need to assert one particular truth: God wants you to know your cause. He does not play games. Because He loves you more than you can understand, He is not going to make the discovery of your cause a tug-of-war in which He simply messes with your head. He designed that cause specifically for you because He knows it will deliver tremendous joy and fulfillment. When you figure it out and commit to it, a win-times-four situation emerges: your life takes on its ultimate meaning, the people you serve are blessed, the world becomes a better place, and God takes pleasure in your obedience and enjoyment.

So how do you find out what your cause is? From experience—mine and others’—I’d argue that the first step is to surrender your will to God. Not surprisingly, that step came fairly easy to Alfred, since he was already at the end of himself. But it’s just as critical for you and me. I know surrender is not a popular idea in an age of independence and self-absorption, but the cornerstone of releasing the power of the cause within you is to affirm in your own mind, heart and spirit that God knows what is best for you and that you are willing to do what He has ordained for you. if you know much about God, you recognize that He has your best interests in mind; any cause that He prepares for you will be something that produces good outcomes in every dimension. It is an application of the biblical passage that reminds us, “If God is for us, who can ever be against us?”

One common mistake people make is to decide what they think the cause should be, develop a plan, and then ask God to bless their plan. That’s exactly what I did when I came to Los Angeles. I was determined that I was going to build a great church for God, and I had an entire plan in mind of just how to do it. My prayer was not that God would reveal His perfect cause for me, but that He would bless my earnest plans for Him. The results of that gambit proved just how backward my approach was. While I suspect God appreciates our effort to do something great for Him, only He knows what is best for us and for His kingdom. So rather than starting with self in mind and working out a plan that you want Him to accept, seek whatever He has in mind for you and adopt His plan. He says we should seek first the things of His kingdom and everything else will fall into place, and this is a perfect situation through which you can prove the viability of that notion.

The importance of this perspective cannot be overestimated. One of its many benefits is that it helps us distinguish between God’s speaking to us and our convincing ourselves of something. Psychologist John Townsend describes that latter voice as “self-talk”—the running conversations we have with ourselves throughout each day as we try to use logic to make sense of reality and respond intelligently. If you are open to surrendering your will to God and accepting His direction and objectives for your life by faith, the nature of your self-talk will shift to being words that affirm His direction and probe the possibilities for carrying out the cause He has placed within you.

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On a practical level, you may be wondering how God will “speak” to you. Most people never hear an audible voice telling them what to do. Yet He communicates clearly and unmistakably with each of us if we know what to be attentive to and how to respond.

In my life, God speaks through passion and circumstances. In other words, He instills a sense of desire and urgency within me. I have a passion to accomplish certain dreams. Because those dreams are not the normal human impulses, especially in today’s self-indulgent culture, I believe those are God-inspired passions.

He further speaks to me by facilitating action related to that passion. He does that by placing me in circumstances that arouse my desire to respond. For instance, a number of times, I have been driving around the neighborhood and seen something that needs attention. Suddenly, my adrenaline level shoots sky-high. One time I saw some kids playing basketball in the street without a court or a hoop; they were just throwing the ball in a garbage can they had elevated on a chair. Immediately I thought, Note to self: provide a regulation basketball court in a safe place with real backboards and hoops for neighborhood kids. I could have driven by without noticing the kids, absorbed in my thoughts, or I could have seen them and thought, Oh, that’s creative, good for them, or Why don’t those kids walk a half mile to the nearest school, climb the chain-link fence, and play on the outdoor court there? But God was opening my eyes and stirring my passion to respond to a need that He would help me address.

I received my breakthrough revelation from God at Echo Park only after obeying an instinct to do what that internal voice was telling me: Get out of bed, go down to the park and wait for Me. From a cultural standpoint, following that instinct was irrational. It was the wrong time of day; it was the wrong place to go (i.e. dangerous); and God had not been answering my direct prayers, so why would He awaken me after midnight and require such an exercise? But that’s how God works. I think it’s one way He tests us to see how willing we are to do what He asks.

If I had not obeyed that instinct, I would not have understood the cause he embedded deep within me. I might still be crying into my pillow in my apartment today, grieving over my inability to grow a great church for God. That’s why I needed to listen to Him. He wasn’t interested in my plans to build Him a great church; He already knew they’d amount to nothing. He had the perfect future set up for me, but I had to be willing to discard my inadequate dream and instead embrace His.

Even though I have been trained as a preacher, I will admit that so often the Holy spirit is mysterious and unpredictable to me. The Holy Spirit is God’s vehicle through whom He speaks to us, but He rarely communicates in audible tones. More often, the Spirit operates as our spiritual conscience, directing us in ways that require us to be led rather than to lead.

Through the Holy Spirit, God may “speak” to you in different ways. Sometimes it is through the internal impressions you receive. Other times it might be an audible voice. Occasionally you might be impacted by circumstances that God uses to grab your attention or direct your energy. In other situations, God might reveal His plan for you through what someone else says to you: sometimes the voice of God is disguised as that of other people.

Of course, we often don’t even know He is speaking. Why not? Because we anticipate His response coming at a particular time or in a specific manner, and He fails to conform to our expectations. Other times He speaks, but we cannot hear His voice over the noise of our lives: we are so distracted, focused on other matters, that when He conveys His message, we miss it.

Are you trying to figure out your cause? Have you been frustrated because you believe God has not spoken to you? Maybe the obstacle is that you’re not sensitive to his voice. Or like me, perhaps you have been so determined to do it your way that you could not accept the signs and situations He placed in your path to capture your attention and get you on the right track.

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I am a big believer that there are no accidents in life and that God wastes no human experience—only we do. In other words, when we experience pain or hardship, we do our best to overcome it and put distance between ourselves and that difficulty. Yet those downtimes might be exactly the springboard that God will use to propel you into the cause that will change your life and many others. Your cause may be related to the pain and suffering you have endured. Often your cause is revealed when you are at the lowest point of the valley, not on the pinnacle of the mountain.

Alfred Lomas is a great example of how God works in this way. Though Alfred seemed to have caught a break when his case was thrown out of court and he was released from prison, he returned to his old neighborhood with no idea of how to escape his past. So Alfred began wandering around the streets, trying to figure out what to do. And then God met him. An elderly woman from Canada who was visiting the Dream Center for a week as part of a church mission trip saw Alfred and walked right up to him. Alfred’s recollection of that experience is priceless:

I’m walking down the street, and I see this grandmother. She sees me and immediately heads over to me. She had the most brilliant smile in the world; there was something about her smile that was just so dazzling. Keep in mind, I’m fresh out of jail, I’m still part of the gang world, and most of the people who saw me on the street or even in jail just turned around and walked the other way. I was hard and mean. You didn’t want to have anything to do with me. But here comes this grandmother, smiling her bright smile, and she just walks right up to me, bold in love, and asks, “Hi, how’re you doing? Have you heard of the Dream Center?”

My first thought was, This old lady must be crazy—there’s something wrong with her. And I looked behind her, and there’s this pack of jokers coming up behind her, but they, too, had this beautiful aura of love and a giving spirit. I could sense it.

But immediately, I felt these walls going up inside of me. You see, when I was really young, I was exposed to a very legalistic, highly condemning group that called itself “Christian.” So that built in me a hatred for Christians. I mean I literally hated Christians and Christianity and anything to do with authority. When I was working in the gang and protecting a drug dealer, I was around people who took the drugs a lot. Sometimes, I’d hear them cry out to God. They’d be wailing about how they were getting divorced, or their money had run out, or they were on a drinking binge and really messed up—all these hard-luck situations. But once they started praying to God, a fury welled up inside of me. I’d pistol-whip them, or hit them, or throw them out because they were praying. Then I’d ask them, “Where’s your God now?” The hypocrisy I’d experienced as a kid really boiled inside of me, and I just hated Christians and churches.

So here’s this 80-year-old lady smiling sweetly in my face, and I was about to cuss her out and tell her what to do with her church and her God—but I just couldn’t’ do it. I was fascinated by this old woman and her love and the fact that she didn’t know or care who I was, she just loved me. And she asked me again if I’d heard of the Dream Center. I’d been in LA most of my life, but I pretty much stuck to my streets, so I’d never heard of it. But I remember thinking, That’s kind of a strange name. She moved a step closer to me, and I remember looking in these beautiful blue eyes she had—they just reflected love—and then she took my hand and very gently said, “If you need a place to stay, we have a place for you.”

I was just drawn to that spirit that was working through her. Then a miracle happened. I asked her, “Really? What kind of place do you have?” I mean, that was not like me. I heard myself saying those words; it was like an out-of-body experience. I was thinking, What are you doing, man? I heard my voice, but it just couldn’t have been me speaking. But it was.

So she called over the guy from the Dream Center who was in the pack of jokers behind her, and he explained that they have a one-year program. And I’m thinking that I only need a day or two to make my connections and get back to my life, but even if they have barbed wire and fences and video cameras, I can break through that stuff. So I told them, sure, I’d sign up for the one year.

We started walking toward the Dream Center, and I asked the lady where it was. She was from Canada and had no idea where we were or where the center was from there, but she looked up in the hills and saw the Hollywood sign, and she said, “It’s in Hollywood.” And right away I froze up a bit and thought, Oh no, it’s a cult. So we kept walking, and I started to wonder what the catch was. We walked over to a bus that would take us to the Dream Center, I got on it, and all these people were on it singing songs to Jesus., and I was thinking, Oh Lord, this is the Charles Manson family. I’d better be on guard; there’s something weird going on here. That stuff was all totally foreign to me.

The bus finally started up, and we’re driving someplace, to the Dream Center, I hoped, and these people were all happy and singing. I sat there looking at them and still wondering, What’s the catch? We got to the Dream Center and—well, here I am, six years later, still working with them, a transformed person. The catch was unconditional love. I went through the discipleship program. One day turned into a week. Once week became a month. Three months into it I gave my life to the Lord. It was not because of what these people said to me, but because of what I saw and experienced—people’s passion for loving others. There was something profound about that, and with my background it had really deep impact on me. You never know the power of servanthood and exactly how God works in a person’s life.

As you know, Alfred volunteered to get involved in the food truck ministry and to help disciple other young men off the streets. Recently, he also started an organization called LA Gang Tours. It provides an opportunity for people to tour the gang area, meet some of the gangsters, and better understand that life. His dream is that people will understand how gangs operate and will bring viable solutions and alternatives to gang-vulnerable areas, as well as to the gang members themselves. He also wants to help break the multigenerational bondage of gang membership. The money he makes from the tours goes into efforts to create jobs and business options in South Central Los Angels, as a practical way of getting people out of the gang world. Because of his relationships and credibility with all the gangs, he has negotiated a peace treaty with them—times when there is an agreed-upon cease-fire and he can conduct his tours. He is also using his connections to begin working on ways to address the growth of the Mexico-based gangs that have branched out from LA.

One of the insights to draw from Alfred’s journey is that his cause is a response to the pain and disappointment he experienced in his gang life. He is taking that bad experience and turning it into something positive. That’s critical. Your pain can become the greatest motivation to embrace your cause. Does your pain crush you, or do you let it mold you and motivate you for positive results? Do you let your suffering overwhelm you and undermine your life, or do you use it as a means for growth?

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Of course, not everybody has a story as dramatic as Alfred’s—nor would I wish that upon people! Often, the best way to figure out the cause within you is through the oldest method in the world: trial and error. In other words, to figure out what God created you to do, just roll up your sleeves and start serving in cooperation with somebody else’s cause. I cannot tell you how many times I encounter people who are clueless about their cause, but once they get involved in serving people—regardless of the nature of the service—God gives them situations or opportunities that instantly ring their bell.

I don’t have to go any further than my wife to know how this process works. Caroline came to the Dream Center after finishing high school. Her father had taken a tour of our ministry, and knowing that she was searching for a way to serve people and grow in her faith, he suggested she check us out. She came, loved what she saw, and immediately signed up to spend a year with us as a volunteer. She didn’t care what she was asked to do; she liked the vibe of the place and wanted to be on the streets, helping people.

When Caroline first started with us, the Dream Center was pretty new; things were not as developed or extensive as they are today. In the early days, it was pretty common for everyone to fill a lot of different functions, including doing administrative work in the main office. Here is her recollection of what happened next:

One day, I was answering phones at the reception desk. We got a call from a social worker who said there was a family in need of food and they only lived a couple of blocks away. So I loaded up my old ’78 Volvo station wagon and headed over to the house. When I walked into that apartment, it changed my life forever. The woman was a single mom, 25 years old, and she had eight young kids, all by different fathers. Most of the kids were just in their underwear or diapers. She lived with all those children in a little apartment with no furniture and just a couple of couch cushions on the floor. The moment we walked in the door with these bags of food, the kids jumped in our arms and started eating raw zucchini. Now how hungry are children when they jump in a stranger’s arms and start eating raw zucchini?

So when I saw what the life of a hungry child looked like here in LA, I knew I couldn’t just go back to the office and keep answering phones; I had to do something about it. We always had a food bank here, but what I discovered is that many people who really need the food don’t even have a way to get here to pick it up. They don’t have transportation, and they can’t just leave their kids at home.

And that’s when we got the idea for the food trucks. I saw an old truck sitting in the parking lot and asked the pastor if we could use it to deliver food to people. He said sure. I picked out a few elementary schools in nearby neighborhoods. We pulled up right when school was letting out, which gave us an automatic crowd, and went up to the ladies who had walked there to get their children. All the moms had little helpers to help them carry the food home. So all of a sudden the food truck ministry was up and running.

Even though Caroline didn’t feel that was really her cause, she wanted to help people, and when she found a need, she dealt with it. She was great at it, too, helping to build the food truck outreach into one of our cornerstone efforts. But though she enjoyed it and saw tremendous results from her efforts—it was satisfying in that sense—the food truck wasn’t her passion.

The funny thing about her involvement with that activity is that I totally misread the situation. I met Caroline while she was a volunteer at the Dream Center, running the food truck ministry, and eventually we got married. For several years, I watched her serve people from the food trucks and thought how wonderful it was that God brought me a wife whose primary cause was to support me as I pursued my cause. But He was about to teach me something important. Here’s what Caroline says:

During my first seven years at the Dream Center, I was out on the streets five or six days a week, serving food and ministering to people. One day I was talking to a friend of mine who was very passionate about orphans and kids in foster care, who are part of many of the families we feed. She told me some statistics about the situation. The one that stood out to me was that more than half of the kids in foster care have parents who love them but lose those kids due to the lack of basic necessities. Those moms love their kids. They’re doing all they can to get by, but they lose their children because they don’t have enough food or other basic necessities, like a refrigerator or beds.

So I thought about that and what it must be like for those women. Social workers give these families a list of things the family has to comply with before the social worker returns at a prescribed time for an inspection. If you’ve done your best to satisfy everything on the list but you haven’t quite accomplished or acquired everything mandated, then you know that when the inspection comes, they’re going to remove your children. That’s how the system works. I couldn’t even imagine what the prayers of those mothers must be like.

I wondered what these families would think about a church and about God if they stepped in and saved the family from losing their kids? So I asked Matthew if it would be OK for me to start an outreach to those moms. He was enthusiastic about it, so we started it up, and it has been going for about a year now. Last year, we saved 200 families from being split apart, and we’ve reunified another 50 families that were split apart.

We have developed a good working relationship with the Department of Child and Family Services. They know we want to keep the families together. They will refer families who are on the edge to us, so we get calls every single day asking us to help those families get what they need so they can meet the department’s requirements and stay together. We stay in close contact with those families, visiting them every week to make sure they are doing OK. And we are excited that many of those families—more than 80 percent of them—also get connected to the church.

When we start working with a family, we also test the education level of the parents. We can then help them pursue their dream, using their gifts and abilities, so they’re not always just trying to survive. We want them to thrive. For example, Mary was one of the moms we helped out. She was in her 40s, had four children, and she couldn’t read. When we evaluated her, she tested at a first-grade level. Can you imagine that? We found out that she had been molested by her father when she was 8, wound up in foster care, and lived in 40 different homes by the time she reached 18. When she was emancipated at 18, she had no education, no job skills—nothing that enabled her to deal with life successfully. I still don’t know how she got by all these years.

Mary has been going through our tutoring program. She’s the oldest person in her class. She gets embarrassed about it and really struggles to keep up. She’s up to a third-grade level now, and doing well, but it’s really difficult for older people. We work with all kinds of volunteers who come to us saying they want to see God do a miracle, but the miracle for Mary would be somebody willing to commit to teaching her how to read and write. That would change her life, the lives of her children, and the lives of future generations coming from her family.

You know, all of this came to a head for me a couple of years ago, after I watched a program called Invisible Children, about children who are left behind in this world. It all seemed so unjust. I asked God in my prayers why it was happening and felt His response was that He’d already paid the price and guaranteed the resources, so the real question was why I was allowing it to happen. That really changed my view of this kind of work. But honestly, I had no idea how passionate I was about these things until I got out there and started working with the people. I am happiest when I am out on the streets, helping people. And it’s so ironic that the things that break my heart are the same things that can bring me such pleasure. Being used by God as part of the solution is incredibly satisfying. When you step into your cause, the good news is that God wants it done even more than you do. He’ll do whatever is necessary to make it work. If you just show up and do what you can, He makes you look like a genius!

Like many pastors, I had fallen into the trap of thinking that my wife’s cause was to help me. I used to wonder why so many pastors’ wives were so miserable. Wasn’t supporting their husband in his pastorate enough? So many of those women feel resigned to watching their husband do this thing without having a chance to pursue their own calling and passions. Thanks to Caroline, it finally dawned on me that there is a big difference between being happy and being fulfilled. She was happy serving people, doing things that fit my ministry vision and staying within the confines of the service opportunities we had in place, but it did not truly fulfill her. I had never asked what her driving passion was, or what her great cause was. How insensitive of me! Thankfully, she found her cause and is changing the world through it.

Over time, I’ve worked with a lot of people who had no clear understanding of their unique cause but were willing to get involved and try out different things. To figure out the great cause within you, you don’t have to have your life totally together, or have figured out the details of your future or even the nature of the cause. You start by substituting God’s will for yours; then you test drive the practice of serving people and let God orchestrate everything from there.

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You might discover your cause by simply becoming aware of other people’s needs. Since your cause is all about alleviating human need of one type or another, stay alert to the needs you witness and how those spark your imagination and passion. Chances are you will be introduced to your cause through such exposure.

Caroline’s work with families fell into place because while she was serving people with one set of needs, she was able to observe the broader spectrum of their lives and needs. In the midst of that, she also had opportunities to speak with other servants who offered their perceptions and ideas. It was out of those observations and conversations that she came in contact with a need that touched her heart at a very deep level.

Like most people, once she encountered that cause, she knew it was her special focus. It hasn’t stopped her from helping people in a variety of ways and situations, but her primary focus is working with those families on the edge of being torn apart for lack of tangible goods that we can supply. Other ways of helping people have grown out of that. For instance, Mary’s experience inspired us to start a related program, the Emancipation Home, to take in teenagers who are turned out of the foster care system but are not ready to take care of themselves. It’s a lot easier to help people when they’re young than later on in life. This ministry, too, began with Caroline tuning in to what she was seeing, hearing and sensing as she helped people.

About 10 years ago, Kelli Bradley visited the Dream Center for a short-term mission trip with a college group the week after she graduated. She returned home to Arkansas but a couple of months later came back to the Dream Center to volunteer for a year. Originally she felt called to serve Caroline and me. For years, she worked faithfully at all kinds of tasks, learning everything we do at the Dream Center.

Through her experience of working with several pregnant teenagers who were struggling to get by, she discovered that her passion was working with hurting families. When my wife started working with foster-care families, she asked Kelli to join her. It was a great match. They were terrific partners for a couple of years, getting that project off the ground. Then Kelli helped increase the number of foster parents and adoptive parents. We wound up renting homes for foster parents to begin taking in children who desperately needed a family.

That evolved into Kelli helping us provide housing and services for homeless families that have lost their income and housing and need transitional assistance to get back on their feet. She now oversees more than two dozen families living at the Dream Center, allowing the families to stay together through their toughest times. That’s usually when such families break apart from the stress and financial hardships. While they’re at the center, we help them find their dream and prepare to pursue it. But Kelli found out her passion for these things by spending time serving Caroline and me, experiencing different types of service, and feeling her heart particularly moved when working with those kinds of families.

If you’re serious about knowing God’s chosen cause for you, think carefully before you turn down invitations to help somebody you know engage in some type of service activity, no matter how big or small it might be. That invitation might be the beginning of the adventure that identifies the means to filling the hole in your heart.

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Kelli also points out that the baggage from their pasts keeps many people from being able to move forward toward their as-yet-unidentified dream. Maybe you or someone close to you has gone through times so difficult that it prevents progress. We’ve found that those hurts and fears must be addressed in order to deal with the pain. Whether that is through counseling or other forms of assistance, dreaming about how to make the most of your life and make the world a better place is more likely to happen once you are freed from the bondage of painful memories or practices. Healing facilitates helping just as helping promotes healing.

Once people get past that garbage from the past, they are ready to stop focusing on themselves and think creatively and freely about the future and how to contribute value. It’s pretty common for us to see people who have been stuck on their problems suddenly light up once they get past those issues and become excited about what they can do. Everyone has strengths and interests that point the way to their causes. Being sufficiently liberated from your pain or limitations to experiment with your strengths and passion—without having to struggle with survival or personal anguish—is a major step toward honoring God through your cause. Kelli frequently reminds people that it’s easier to help people than you might think, but sometimes you have to help yourself get to a place where you can bless others with your best thinking and effort.

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When you’re in the process of trying to figure out your cause, here’s one last piece of advice: Your breakthrough may happen when you least expect it. The provision and identification of your cause is a gift from God to you; it’s not in your power to control when you discover the cause. You may do whatever you can to be ready to receive that understanding, but you cannot force the timing. When God is ready to reveal the cause, He’ll do so. My observation is that He often seems to do so when you’re truly ready to embrace the cause.

My Echo Park experience underscores this principle. Until I was so brokenhearted that I didn’t know what else I could possibly do, I was not really prepared to listen. After all, I thought I had already figured out what God needed; I was going to build Him a great church. Had God revealed the cause to me before our encounter in Echo Park, it would have been a waste of time. Come to think of it, maybe He did try to reveal it prior to the encounter. I don’t know; if He did, I certainly wasn’t ready to listen because I was too focused on pursing the cause of my making. It wasn’t until I was out of energy, ideas and hope that He had my attention. At that point, He enlightened me.

That’s probably the same course of action he’ll take with you too. The decision to finally surrender your will and your choice of cause is crucial to facilitating His revealing the cause to you.

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Not sure what your cause is? Don’t sit around doing nothing, waiting for the perfect circumstances to bring clarity. Not many of us jump from doing nothing into the ideal conditions for serving without some false starts, missteps and hardships in between. Find some people you trust and would like to serve alongside of and get involved. While you’re helping them, you’ll be making a positive contribution to society, getting to know yourself better (your passions and strengths), and giving God more opportunities to speak to you about your cause. It’s kind of like the Nike campaign: just do it!

What I’ve Learned
• God wants you to know the cause He has for you, so ask Him to reveal it.
• Your cause relates to the needs of other people.
• Sometimes your cause emerges out of your pain or hardships.
• Serving alongside others often allows your passion to become clear.
• A breakthrough in identifying your cause may come when you least expect it.
• The first step is to surrender your will to His.

Matthew Barnett is the senior pastor of Angelus Temple in Los Angeles and co-founder, with his father, Tommy Barnett, of the Los Angeles Dream Center, which operates more than 270 ministries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He is the author of The Church That Never Sleeps and The Cause Within You.

This excerpt is from The Cause Within You: Finding the One Great Thing You Were Created to Do in This World by Matthew Barnett with George Barna. Copyright 2011 Matthew Barnett. The Cause Within You is published by Barna, an imprint of Tyndale House Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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