Who has God wired you to be? What works has he prepared in advance for you to participate in? How and where does he want you to enter the story he is telling – and is it a place that no one else can enter in the same way you can, given your history, your personality, your gifts and passions? These are the questions of calling.
In Acts 17, Paul’s brief sermon to the people of Athens contains words that float up for me as I consider this puzzle: 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
Is it possible that this God of all history, and all present, and all future really marked out for me an appointed time in history and the country in which I should live? And with all of history, the present and the future on his plate, does he have time to even care whether I’m seeking him or not? Does he have his eye on me – not in the generic ‘he’s got the whole world in his hands’ sort of way, but in the 2 Chronicles 16:9 sort of way, “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.”
Do I really believe with the Psalmist (Psalm 139: 13-16) that I am knitted together with specific purpose for a specific number of days – or is it just prose?
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
All of us humans are on a continuum between total disbelief and fully committed trust. While some scoff at the notion that God, if such a being exists at all, has a personal reason or relationship with humans, my life has convinced me that I AM is. At different times, in various season of my life I’ve made great leaps from doubt toward trust – at others, I’ve clung to the faith I had like a climber who hangs onto a bare root on the side of a cliff. Sometimes, I’ve fallen and needed to remember that Jesus said, “Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.” (Matthew 21:44) No one wants to be broken, but I’d rather be broken than crushed.
In Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Ruth Haley Barton points out that when God called to Moses out of the burning bush, his deepest questions had to do with not believing God really made him and called him for a purpose at a specific time in history. “Who am I? Who are you? What if they won’t listen to, or believe me? What if I’m not good enough? What will I say?”
“Any kind of authentic calling usually takes us to a place where we have serious objections of some sort,” says Barton. “Places where we feel inadequate – where we confront our own willfulness and our preconceived ideas about how we thought our life would go, where we think what God is asking us to do is downright impossible or where we just don’t want to take the risk. But one of the ways we recognize calling is that it has come about in ways that could not be humanly orchestrated and so it cannot be easily dismissed.” (page 80)
Last week, I asked you to consider where the burning bushes in your life were. This week, if you took time to pause and consider, I wonder whether a bunch of questions and self-doubt surfaced? It did for Moses, and it did for me as well. But God was willing to answer Moses’ questions, and the calling was persistent. I have to believe he will do the same for you and me. So, this week, let’s make time to listen at the burning bushes. To ask our questions and listen for God’s answers. To take another step toward fully trusting this God who says he marked out for us a time and a place in history. Why? So that we might seek him, and perhaps reach out for him and find him, although he is not far from any of us.
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