Calling

Fair warning, this post is written in a context of Christianity.

So there was this one sermon I listened to by one pastor. And what he said was basically, you do one important thing in life and that's it, that's what you were born for, everything before that was just preparing you for it or leading up to it. (And though he didn't say this part, the corollary is obvious: everything you do after it is irrelevant because you've already done what you were put on earth to do.) His specific example was Abraham and his chosen "defining moment" for him was Isaac on Mt Moriah.

I think this is a steaming pile of [censored] [censored] [censored].

It's undeniable that some things you do are going to be more important than other things, and one of them is going to be top of the pile. But look, if you say that Abraham's "calling" was to almost-sacrifice Isaac, with all the attendant symbolism, then you trivialise and invalidate everything else he did both before and after.

Not to mention the other two problems with this thought process, when we try to apply it to real life. One, real life contains a whole lot of people who get born, live, and die without ever achieving anything on the same scale as the people who make it into history books. What's the calling of an average person, if calling is defined as the one single task they were born to do? How can anyone tell?

And two, which is much more important. Thinking in this way causes us to constantly be looking for our One Ring Thing. Constantly questioning ourselves. What if-? How do I know-? What the hell am I doing all this hard stuff for if it's just practice for one moment of glory, and what the hell am I supposed to do with myself after that, assuming I can even tell when I did it?

Huh. I'm swearing, which usually means it's time to move on to the next bit.

Instead of that system, I propose this one: calling is in the small things in life. It's in refilling your flatmate's empty glass of water, it's in giving your buddy a ride to the airport, it's in doing your best to provide tech support to the frustrated young lady on the other end of the line. There are good works prepared beforehand that we may walk in them; we have many opportunities each day to love God and love our neighbour.

Where you go is not the point here. Most people don't get a specific request to go to a less developed country and do churchy stuff there. And for good reason too, the world wouldn't run without its technicians, pilots, etc. Wouldn't even run all that well without fast food employees, and most definitely not without cleaners.

If God wants to put you in a more traditional missions setting, believe me, you'll know it. But that doesn't make missionaries any more important than any other person of the church. Whether you're there or here, you do your work (ministry related or otherwise) as doing it for God. You act towards others with love and you be a Christian, because that's what we're called to do. Yes, this includes sharing your faith with gentleness and respect. Calling is in the little things. If you do a big one too, hooray for you, it's in his records and you'll be appropriately rewarded in the end. But there is meaning in everything you do, because whatever you do, you do for the glory of God. That's what we were put here for. Not to do one big glorious thing (and spend our lives looking over our shoulders and wondering if we pulled it off), but to live our lives and do the little things according to our beliefs, in a manner we would not be ashamed of.

(You think it's hard to be called to missions? Doing missions is nothing compared to doing life.)