Growing up, I would use the term “call” only in connection with religious professionals. Ministers, missionaries, and holy people could feel “Called” to something, as long as that something was connected to the institutional church. When I went to seminary, talking about my “call to ministry” sounded completely normal… but if I had felt led toward a career in business, I never would have referred to that as a call—it just was not the way the word was used.
I feel differently about that now. Call is for all of God’s people, and it is about more than just a career. This kind of incarnational living is about listening for God in the dailiness of life. It is about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to. It is about where we devote our time and energy, including work, relationships, and volunteer efforts. It is about navigating the creative tensions that come up as we seek to “love our neighbor as ourself.” Whereas I don’t think God cares much about whether or not I go get a latté, the decision I face this weekend about whether to give precious hours to self care (Should I kayak? Read?) or other options (Play with the kids? Take care of the house? Volunteer my time in the community?) is a kind of decision that requires listening and discernment. Depending on a multitude of factors, any of these things could be the faithful thing for me to do this weekend.
Listening for call is simply about seeking to hear and respond to God’s presence
in the fullness and complexity of our lives. It is about our response to God’s
continuing invitation for wholeness in our daily life toward the common good. It
is simply that—but it is not simple.
Our Uniqueness and the World’s Needs
In defining call, most people who have written on the topic attempt to hold at least two things together—the uniqueness of the person and the needs of the world. There are all the personal factors (gifts, experiences, passions, talents, etc.)… and then there are all the needs of the world. If you have ever heard a sermon or read a book on vocation, you have most likely heard Frederick Buechner’s famous quote:
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
This quote is brilliant in that it brings together two critical aspects of call: the uniqueness of the individual and the brokenness of the world. Call cannot just be about our gifts and our deep gladness, at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective. The bigger picture is that God wants the world to be a better place. There is the reign of God, the common good, and shalom to consider. The world’s deep hunger is on display every day—not just in the big issues, but also in each of our little corners of the world. And for some odd reason, God chooses to use us—in all our broken, flawed humanity—to address these hungers. Interestingly, both the Old and New Testaments are filled with people who are called by God to accept a task, yet seem like the wrong choice for that task. Moses is a lousy public speaker, but is asked by God to plead the Hebrew’s case to Pharoah. If it were as simple as figuring out what we were good at and then applying those gifts, half the people in the Bible wouldn’t have been called. Call is much bigger than our gifts and gladness, because God is much bigger and more mysterious than our gifts and gladness.
At the same time, if call is only about the needs of the world and has no connection to our uniqueness, gifts, or experience, then it is a recipe for burnout and resentment. It will miss one of the clear marks of God’s activity, which is joy. In the film Chariots of Fire, when Olympic runner Eric Liddell says “When I run, I feel [God’s] pleasure,” he is expressing the joy of doing something he is good at.
To our joy and the world’s needs Catholic priest Michael Himes has added a third dimension: our growth. He asks of a potential call, “Will this way of living and working make you grow and continue to expand? Will it call forth your talents and gifts? Will it stretch you?” It is a good reminder that the spiritual life is always about growing, stretching, and becoming new.
Putting these three aspects of call together, I would say that living a call-based life is a challenging joy. I say challenging because call always involves a stretch by asking me to act for the good of others. (And here it is worth saying that sometimes caring for ourselves is a legitimate call as well). This requires me to step outside of myself and my comfort zone, which I am not so good at. Self interest is generally more interesting than the needs of others in the short run. Yet at the end of the day—and here is the irony— caring only about ourselves generally doesn’t make us happy. But joy is an important part of the equation as well, simply because the Caller is one who desires this for us.
But I Hate My Job…
I may have lost some of you on page 1. Any mention of work and call in the same breath makes some people a bit queasy. Many people would give several names to their paid work, but call isn’t one of them.
My friend Marilyn is an example. She is a programmer at a large computer company. She is good at her work, and enjoys many aspects of it. She has a dream to combine her technical expertise with art in some way, but she cannot consider changing jobs yet. There are pressing family financial and insurance issues to consider. She is clear about the need to stay at her job for the time being for the good of her family. At the same time, the way she goes about her programming work clearly reflects her faith. Her interactions with colleagues and her concern for quality, ethics, and the common good are testaments to her faith. She would say that her work is not call, but definitely an expression of her faith.
Not all of life is call. Our paid employment, volunteer committee work, or other daily activities may or may not feel like call to us. It could be that these aspects of life do not feel like call because we have never been invited to see them that way. Or they may just not be our call. Nevertheless, these activities are sacred, God cares about them, and how we go about them matters. We need a name for these endeavors that doesn’t compartmentalize or diminish them; in the following pages, I will refer to them as ministry.
Like call, the word ministry has been used almost exclusively for religious professionals. At its roots, however, it simply means “to care” or “to serve.” One time after speaking about this word, a proud alumna of Wellesley College approached me and asked if I knew the motto of her alma mater. I did not. She told me that it is Non Ministrari sed Ministrare, which means (for those whose Latin is a bit rusty) “Not to be ministered unto but to minister.” Even those who are not ordained clergy or graduates of Wellesley are ministers to the world. Or, as another friend put it, “We may or may not feel called to what we are doing, but we are always in ministry.”
And Then it Gets Difficult
And certainly and easily I can see how God might be one rose bud, One white feather in the heron’s enormous, Slowly opening wing. It’s after that It gets difficult. – Mary Oliver
So far, so good. All we have to do is listen for God’s call, apply it to our lives on a daily basis, and the world will get better.
I’ll say it before you do—it isn’t that simple. As Mary Oliver writes, there are times we can easily see God in various things. We have our spiritual, mountaintop moments, but living that out day after day is enormously challenging. We listen for God’s call—but how do we know when it is God’s voice and when it is someone or something else? We try to apply it to our lives—but how do we apply it, what will it mean, and what will it cost us? And the world will get better—except that sometimes it won’t, and then we will wonder if we have wasted our time, or if it really was God’s voice we heard.
Think about the famous words from Ecclesiastes 3: There is a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
Sometimes it is very clear what time it is for us— perhaps a time to plant ourselves in some way, or a time to celebrate. In a person (or organization for that matter), it may be a time to mourn, or to let go of some part of ourselves. But depending on the time, the exact opposite thing might be the faithful option: rather than plant, a time to move on; rather than celebrate, a time to mourn.
To put it in modern language, at one time the faithful thing might be to stay in a job that is not your call, whereas another time the faithful choice may be to take a scary leap of faith and transition to something else. For one person it might be right to say “yes” to a new committee assignment even though she is already busy; for another, “no” is the faithful answer, even though that person has plenty of time.
This is when the spiritual life gets difficult. How do we know? What are we called to do with our limited time and energy? How can we sustain ourselves in ministry, especially when it is not our call? Who will help us?
Excerpted from Called, Together, by Doug Wysockey-Johnson. This book is a Faith at Work resource, available by using the form on p. 29 in this magazine, online at FaithatWork.com, or calling 1-800-245-7378.
If you are interested in a training on how to create a Called Together Community, contact the Faith at Work office.