Pastor Kevin Rogers blogs at The Orphan Age, where this piece appeared recently under the title, Tedious Boredom and Sheer Terror.
I spoke with a man whose job was to drive locomotive through Northern Ontario. When asked what his job was like he said, “It is days of tedious boredom combined with moments of sheer terror.”
So why had he devoted his adult life to the rails?
Why do truckers endure the long haul and why do daycare workers put up with demanding parents and low pay?
Some work because it is a means to an end. They endure their job in order to pay the bills and put their kids through college. Still, others are engaged in their work (paid and unpaid) because they are compelled to. They have an inner sense of being in the right place. They see higher value than the task at hand.
Pastors, chaplains and community builders often have that inner sense. We name it ‘the call of God’. It may involve a ‘job’ that we do to pay the bills, but something deeper calls us to live each moment purposefully.
The call of God is a bit like the call of the sea. It may not be very specific. It may not be a call to this ocean or that ocean, or to this particular port or that one; it is more like a restless, yearning, which can only be satisfied by going to sea. *
A look at the men and women God called in Scripture reveals seasons of restless yearning and times of faith to take great risk. You find yourself somewhere in that continuum. Can you look at your current community and say that you are there by God’s choosing? It might be good to know that.
The qualifier that separates picking a career from responding to God’s Call is the sense that you must do this. It is your love response to the God who beckoned you to Himself.
‘It is God Who saved us and called us with a holy calling. Not according to our works, but to further His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the world began’ (2 Timothy 1:9).
When we struggle with contentment, challenge and uncertainty in our place of service we need to recall the First Call. The calling to be a disciple of Jesus is the highest calling that sustains you when your position becomes redundant, someone else is elected or you are unemployed.
God chooses to further His own purpose and grace through your life, in season and out.
Kevin Rogers
* A sermon preached by John Hull on February 4th 2007 in the Chapel of the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham, to mark the end of a residential course on the Mission of the Church in Britain. www.johnmhull.biz/SermonTheCallOfGod.doc
Christianity 201 
Thanks Paul for the re-blog. I appreciate all your blogging and keeping people thinking about what matters.
Comment by communitychaplain — November 11, 2011 @ 9:44 pm |
One of the most unsettling, even disturbing conundrum in all my spiritual experience is the question of what is the call or will of God. It was resolved finally confirmed to me over time in the most elegant revelation as Christ. We are called to be sons of God and inherit the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. The ramifications of this is so far reaching that Jesus said the very least in my kingdom is greater than Moses. The existential fact of God is given to us as a gift to be our identity, and to do the works of God in the ministry of reconciling the world unto God, as God was doing in Christ doing and has left for us to do in his absence.
Today folks think that being born again encompasses all that God has for man, apart from the “ in the sweet, by and by” life to come, In truth there is a whole world of living that follows as consequence of being born again. This new kind of life into which we are born is explored about as much as the new world before Christopher Columbus did the heavy lifting of expanding our horizons; which is to say this world is not explored at all. As glorious as the born again experience is, it only gains us entrance into a life where the miraculous is to be as commonplace as the air one breathes moment by moment.
Comment by newgenesisres — November 11, 2011 @ 10:59 pm |