Put the same news feed in front of ten believers and watch where their eyes stop. One lingers on the story about children in foster care. Another skips it and reads every word about a church split. A third can’t get past the report on addiction in her county. A fourth closes the app and goes straight to the business section. None of them is more spiritual than the others. Each of them is being tugged by something, and most of them have never asked why.
The Design section asked what God built into your hands. The Affinity section asks what He set in your heart: what you’re drawn to, what moves you and what fills you back up. Your design says what you can do. Your affinity says what you care to do it for.
So the question is:
What breaks your heart, and what fills it back up — and what if neither one is an accident?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You formed my heart, and You know why it reacts the way it does. Show me which of my reactions are Yours: the grief You put there on purpose, the anger that’s really a longing for things to be made right, the joy that tells me I’m doing what You made me for. Sort out what’s only my flesh from what’s Your fingerprint. In Jesus’ name, amen.
God forms each human heart individually, and the particular things that move you are part of His design. That’s the claim this section defends. It matters, because many believers assume their sympathies are random, or that they ought to care equally about everything, and they feel guilty when they don’t.
“He is the one who forms (הַיֹּצֵר) every human heart, and takes note of all their actions.”
Word Study
יָצַר yāṣar H3335
“forms” · Psalm 33:15
Range. To form, fashion or shape, especially as a potter shapes clay. It is the verb of Genesis 2:7 (“the Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground”) and of the potter’s workshop in Jeremiah 18, where the participle simply means the potter. It occurs about 63 times.
The sense here. God as the potter of the inner life. The psalm has just pictured the Lord looking down from heaven on “all the inhabitants of the earth” (Psalm 33:14). Then it narrows to each one: He “forms every human heart.” The heart here is the center of the person, where desire, thought and will live.
Why it carries the argument. A potter doesn’t make every vessel the same. He shapes each one for its use. If God forms each heart as a potter forms a pot, then the particular shape of yours (what draws you, what grieves you, what you can’t stop thinking about) is part of the workmanship, not a defect in it. That means the book’s instruction is exactly right: don’t judge another believer’s lack of emotional response to your cause, and don’t condemn yourself for not feeling everything everyone else feels. Different vessels, different uses.
Source. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
That doesn’t mean every feeling you have is holy. Hearts are formed by God and also bent by the Fall, and Session 2 has already reminded you that the heart is hard to read from the inside (Jeremiah 17:9). But it does mean the pattern of what moves you, sustained over years, is worth taking seriously as evidence.
Illustration
In 1948 a young English social worker named Cicely Saunders sat at the bedside of a patient named David Tasma. He was a Polish-Jewish refugee who had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, and he was dying of cancer, alone, in a busy London hospital that had little idea how to care for someone it could no longer cure. When he died, he left her £500, to be, in his words, “a window in your home.”
Saunders couldn’t let go of what she had seen. She had already trained as a nurse; now, to change how the dying were treated, she went back to school and qualified as a physician in 1957, at a time when few women did. In 1967 she opened St Christopher’s Hospice in London, the world’s first purpose-built modern hospice, and the model for the hospice movement that followed. A single bedside broke her heart. Nineteen years later, that heartbreak had a building, and a window in it.
Pause & Reflect
Whose lack of concern for your cause have you quietly judged? What if God simply shaped them for a different burden?
The effects of the Fall that move you to act, and not just to feel, often point toward the part of the world God wants to mend through you. Jesus Himself was moved this way, and Matthew shows us what He did with it.
“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη) on them because they were bewildered and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest.’”
Word Study
σπλαγχνίζομαι splanchnizomai G4697
“had compassion” · Matthew 9:36
Range. To be moved with compassion; to feel pity from the depths. The verb comes from splanchna, the inward parts, which Thayer notes “gradually came to denote the seat of the affections.” It occurs twelve times, all of them in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
The sense here. A deep, visceral response to the condition of the crowds, a compassion felt, not merely decided. In the Gospels the word is used almost entirely of Jesus, and of a few characters in His parables, like the Samaritan who stops for the wounded man (Luke 10:33) and the father who sees his lost son coming home (Luke 15:20).
Why it carries the argument. In the Gospels this compassion never stays a feeling. It’s the hinge between seeing and acting: Jesus is moved, and then He heals, feeds, teaches or sends. Here, He tells the disciples to pray for workers, and a few verses later “Jesus sent out these twelve” (Matthew 10:5). The people told to pray for workers became the answer to their own prayer. That’s the pattern of a God-given passion: it moves you in the gut, and then it moves you out the door.
Source. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
Not all of Jesus’ deep responses looked like tenderness. In a synagogue, faced with religious leaders more concerned with a Sabbath rule than a man’s withered hand, “he looked around at them in anger, grieved by the hardness of their hearts” (Mark 3:5). Anger and grief together, and then healing. Some of your passion may show up first as anger. The question is whether it’s the kind of anger that wants to mend something.
You’ve already seen this pattern in Nehemiah (Session 1): a report about Jerusalem’s broken walls, and “I sat down abruptly, crying and mourning for several days” (Nehemiah 1:4). You’ve seen it in Moses, too, in its rawest form. Long before he was ready, “he went out to his people and observed their hard labor” (Exodus 2:11), and his heart broke so hard that he drew the stray line of Session 1: he killed a man. The passion was real and God-given. The timing and the method were his own. Forty years later God sent him back to the same people, carrying the same burden, now ready.
Consider This
Hot buttons are useful clues, but read them carefully. We tend to react soulishly rather than respond faithfully when someone pushes our passion button. A reaction is heat without direction. A response asks, What would help? As you work Step 7, notice which of your hot buttons produce only outrage and which produce a desire to do something. The second kind is the better evidence.
Don’t be ashamed if a reaction is what you find first. In an actual group that worked through these steps, one woman admitted that what she felt about people stuck in addiction was frustration, “when they know better.” That was a reaction, and she was honest enough to name it. By the vision step it had become a plan: a house for people coming out of incarceration, most of them with a history of addiction, and a curriculum she wanted to rewrite around God’s truth. The reaction had been pointing at a response all along.
Illustration
The same group’s answers to Step 7 fell into a few familiar shapes. Six of twenty named harm done to children or to the innocent. Four named people living under lies about who they are. If those categories were the whole answer, everyone in each cluster would share a purpose. They didn’t, because the strongest answers went past the category to particular people. One man named “physically- or developmentally-disabled people being mistreated or lacking adequate support.” One woman paired each heartbreak with the pull it created in her: “I am drawn to protect people that are vulnerable… I am drawn to bring clarity where there is confusion (my heart breaks with misunderstandings).”
Two other kinds of answer show what this step is not asking. Some people reflected on the Fall itself: Adam and Eve’s choice, and their own share in it. That’s good theology, and it isn’t this step. Others listed their own losses: a death in the family, a long illness, a job that ended. Those matter deeply, and Session 8 will come back to them, because your own wounds often explain your passions. But Step 7 asks which of the Fall’s effects in the world around you stop you, and whom you want to help because of them.
Pause & Reflect
What kind of news story do you always stop to read? When you do, do you mostly feel angry, or do you find yourself wishing you could help?
Some activities drain other people and fill you, even when they leave you physically tired. That difference is not a measure of your devotion. It’s a clue to your design. Scripture shows it in two scenes, one in David’s army and one at a well in Samaria.
When Amalekite raiders burned the town of Ziklag and carried off the families of David’s men, David set out after them with six hundred men. At the Wadi Besor, “two hundred men who were too exhausted to cross the Wadi Besor stayed there,” while David and four hundred others went on (1 Samuel 30:10). The same assignment, under the same blessing, emptied some men and drove others forward. And when the others came back victorious, some of them wanted to deny the exhausted two hundred their share. David refused: “The portion of the one who went down into the battle will be the same as the portion of the one who remained with the equipment!” (1 Samuel 30:24). Being energized by the chase didn’t make the four hundred better servants. It made them different ones.
The second scene is Jesus at Jacob’s well. John notes that “Jesus, since he was tired from the journey, sat right down beside the well” (John 4:6). By the time the disciples came back from town with food, He had spent the afternoon in one of the most significant conversations of His ministry, with a Samaritan woman whose whole town would soon come out to meet Him. The disciples urged Him to eat. His answer:
“I have food to eat that you know nothing about… My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work.”
Jesus arrived tired and left fed. Doing the Father’s work, the particular work in front of Him, restored Him in a way lunch couldn’t. That’s what Step 8 is looking for: not only what rests you (though that matters too), but what you can do for hours, come home physically spent, and still feel more alive than when you started.
In an actual group that worked through these steps, about half answered Step 8 only with ways they rest or worship: music, hiking, walks, reading, time alone with God. Every one of those matters, and some, like worship, may be the most important hours of your week. But rest restores everyone, so it can’t tell you much about what you are for. The answers that pointed somewhere named something the person does. “I love identifying inefficient tools or processes and building new systems that lead to tangible improvements for peoples’ work or daily lives,” wrote one man. One woman who now leads a ministry to the elderly traced her joy in it back to volunteering at a hospital as a teenager, where the staff kept placing her with elderly patients “because they said I got along well and was patient with them.”
And one woman found her answer while she was writing it. After describing worship and writing, she added a line she hadn’t planned: “Doing the behind the scenes work, set up, prep work, the simple things I can do to contribute to the whole and make me feel like I belong.” Then, in parentheses: “Wow, that’s something Holy Spirit just popped out on me.” That is what the third move of the Listening Rhythm, sit with it, is for.
Frederick Buechner put the two halves of this session together in one sentence that has been quoted ever since:
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Frederick Buechner · Presbyterian minister and novelist · Wishful Thinking, 1973
In the picture you’ve been drawing since Session 1, your design supplied the colors. Your heart supplies their intensity. Your passions and pursuits show where the color runs deepest, the places where the Artist pressed hardest on the pencil. But deep color marks where your picture is concentrated, not how much you’re worth. David gave the two hundred who stayed at the Wadi Besor exactly the same portion as the four hundred who pressed on (1 Samuel 30:24).
Step 7 looks for the world’s deep hunger that moves you. Step 8 looks for your deep gladness. The Affinity statement you’ll write in Session 7 will look for where they meet.
Pause & Reflect
After what kind of day do you come home tired and happy? What were you doing?
The objection deserves a straight answer because a wrong answer can do damage in both directions. If God made me for something, shouldn’t it energize me? Some teachers say that when you’re on the right path, burnout just doesn’t happen. So when I’m exhausted by a ministry, isn’t that proof I’m in the wrong one? And if I’m not supposed to feel drained, what does it mean that I’m drained so often? One woman in an actual group that worked through these steps asked it about her own children’s ministry: “I love teaching my Littles but do admit to sometimes getting a little burnt out doing it every Sunday, but I dont think that disqualifies it?”
Scripture won’t support the strong version of that claim. Jeremiah was unmistakably called. He was also worn out by the call: “his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of me… I grow weary of trying to hold it in; I cannot contain it” (Jeremiah 20:9). Paul, in the center of his assignment, listed “many sleepless nights,” hunger and cold, and “the daily pressure on me of my anxious concern for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:27–28). Jesus Himself sat down at the well tired (John 4:6). A true calling can exhaust you.
What Step 8 is looking for is a different distinction: whether an activity costs you energy or drains you of it. A calling costs energy the way a good workout does: you’re spent, but something in you is stronger for it, and you want to go back. A mismatch drains you: the tiredness comes with dread, the work gives nothing back, and rest doesn’t restore the desire to return. Most people can feel the difference once they’ve named it. The woman with the Littles had already answered her own question: she loved them, and she was tired. That’s the first kind. Exhaustion can also have nothing to do with fit: a season, a crisis, grief, illness, overwork in the right role. If you’re chronically worn out, don’t diagnose it only through this course. Talk to someone who knows you, and take care of your body; Elijah’s recovery, remember, began with sleep and a meal (1 Kings 19:5–8).
Where this stays unresolved. Scripture doesn’t give a rule for deciding when a draining assignment should be endured and when it should be laid down. Jeremiah stayed. Paul and Barnabas parted ways over a ministry decision (Acts 15:39). What Scripture does give you is the rest of this course: your design, your witness, the evidence of fruit and the voice of the Spirit. Weigh the drain alongside those. It’s one witness, not a verdict.
Everything above has been explanation. God forms each heart like a potter forms a vessel, and the sustained pattern of what moves you is part of His design. Compassion that comes from Him moves you in the gut and then out the door. And the activities that fill you back up, even when they tire you, are clues to what you were made to do, while exhaustion by itself is not a verdict.
Now you start listening to your own heart on purpose. Hearts are slower to read than test results, so the next two steps take more days than the last five. Give them the time.
Open your calendar for the last four weeks, or reconstruct it from memory if you don’t keep one. Beside every meeting, task, commitment and free block, put a mark: + if you came out of it with more energy than you went in with, − if you came out with less, and = if it made no difference.
Then look at the pluses. What do they have in common? Is it people or tasks? Building or fixing? Teaching or learning? Leading or serving? Planning or improvising? Outdoors or in? Look at the minuses the same way. Write down any pattern you see in three or four sentences. Step 8 will start from this page.
Discovery Steps · Steps 7 and 8
These open the Affinity section. Use the Listening Rhythm for each step: ask to be searched; do the work; sit with it; test it with the witnesses; sleep on it.
Step 7 · My Passions
The prompt. What breaks your heart? What effects of the Fall trigger an emotional response in you?
What to do. For three days, keep a short log. Every time a news story, a conversation, a scene or a memory stops you and stirs you, write one line: what it was, and what you felt (grief, anger, longing, compassion). On the fourth day, read the log and group what you’ve written. Then ask your witness: “What have you seen me get fired up about over the years?” Finally, for each group, ask yourself the Consider This question: does this only make me react, or does it make me want to help? Keep the step pointed outward. Your own losses belong in Session 8; here, name the people or situations in the world that you’re drawn to help.
What to produce. Three to five passions, ranked from strongest emotional response to weakest. Write each as “I am drawn to [people or situation]…”, followed by one sentence about a time you acted on it, or badly wanted to.
Surface answer: “Literally all of it. I go online or turn on the news and I can’t look at it for more than a couple of minutes before I am overwhelmed with so many different emotions that I can’t keep them straight.” (A real answer, and an honest one. The Fall really is everywhere. But a heart that breaks for everything can’t yet tell you where to go. The three-day log is how you find out which of “all of it” stops you most.)
Deep answer: “1. I’m drawn to kids aging out of foster care with nobody to call when things go wrong. I read every story about it, and I’ve sat with two of them through a first apartment lease. 2. …”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least four days, because of the log.
Step 8 · My Pursuits
The prompt. What activities recharge your emotional and spiritual batteries?
What to do. Start with the pluses from The Calendar Test. Add anything that didn’t show up in four weeks but always fills you when it happens: a retreat, a mission trip, a project at work. Then ask yourself: What do I find myself thanking God for, over and over? Separate the activities that rest you (a walk, a nap, time with friends) from the ones that fill you while they cost you effort. Both are worth knowing, but the second kind says more about your purpose. Answer about yourself, not about recharging in general: a list of ways Christians are supposed to refill their batteries tells you nothing about yours.
What to produce. Three to five statements beginning “I love…”. At least two must be activities you do for others or produce, not only ways you rest. Under each, one sentence of evidence: when you last did it, and how you felt afterward.
Surface answer: “Fishing and disc golf and pray walking and hiking.” (A real answer. All four are good, and all four rest him. None of them is something he does for anyone else, so the list can’t yet point toward an assignment. His later steps showed a man whose heart was set on the homeless; a deeper Step 8 would have found that thread here.)
Deep answer: “I love taking a mess nobody wants, like a disorganized closet, a confused spreadsheet or a stalled volunteer team, and leaving it working. I’m physically tired afterward and happier than when I started. Last time: reorganizing the food pantry in March.”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least two days.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
What breaks your heart and what fills it back up are both in God’s handwriting.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You shaped my heart like a potter shapes clay, and You meant its shape. Thank You for the things You’ve made me grieve and the things You’ve made me love. Turn my reactions into responses, and my compassion into action. Show me where my gladness meets the world’s hunger. When I’m tired, feed me the way You fed Jesus at the well, with the joy of doing Your will. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973; rev. ed. A Seeker’s ABC, 1993). Short, witty, one-page entries on Christian words. The entry on “Vocation,” quoted in this session, is a one-minute read worth a week of reflection.
Substantial
Shirley du Boulay, Cicely Saunders: The Founder of the Modern Hospice Movement (1984; updated with Marianne Rankin, 2007). The full story behind this session’s illustration: how one burden, carried for twenty years, reshaped care for the dying around the world.
Academic
Matthew A. Elliott, Faithful Feelings: Rethinking Emotion in the New Testament (2006). A careful study of emotion language in the New Testament, including compassion, anger and joy, and a corrective to the idea that feelings are spiritually irrelevant.
Leading This Session
This session opens the Affinity section, and it moves from test results to self-observation, which some people find harder. Keep the group focused on patterns, not single feelings. The predictable stall is guilt: someone realizes they don’t feel much about a cause the group cares about, and assumes that means they’re hard-hearted. Read the yāṣar word study and the What I Am Not Saying aloud. In pairs, have people share their three-day logs from Step 7 and help each other sort reaction from response. Group questions: What news story always stops you? and What did The Calendar Test show you? Three predictable misses from an actual group that worked through these steps: at Step 7, answers that reflect on the Fall as doctrine, or list the person’s own losses, instead of naming whom they want to help; at Step 7 again, “all of it”; and at Step 8, about half the group listing only ways they rest. Ask each person for one thing they do that fills them. If someone’s passion comes out as frustration, don’t correct it. Ask what they wish would happen instead; the answer is often the response hiding inside the reaction.
If you have questions or comments about this content, or about your personal situation, email us at feedback@thedisciplespath.com.
Next: Session 6, Your Arena, asks where your heart has already been at work, in the ministries you’ve served in, and where it’s being drawn next: which of society’s “mountains” of influence you’re built to climb.
Session 5 · Kingdom Purpose
Your Heart
What breaks your heart, and what fills it back up?
Hearts Formed on Purpose
God forms each heart as a potter forms a vessel. What moves you is part of His design.
What Breaks Your Heart
God-given compassion moves you in the gut, then out the door.
What Fills You Back Up
Some work tires you and feeds you at once. That’s a clue to your design.
1 Samuel 30:10, 24 John 4:34
So · Now
What breaks your heart and what fills it back up are both in God’s handwriting.
Take The Calendar Test, keep a three-day passion log, then complete Step 7 (passions) and Step 8 (pursuits).
Discovery Steps · Steps 7 and 8
Kingdom Principle
What breaks your heart and what fills it back up are both in God’s handwriting.