You may have noticed, everyone is talking about calling. You can find articles written about calling on nearly every major online website. I went to Relevant Magazine yesterday, and sure enough one of their most popular articles was on calling. They publish about one a week on calling.
You can’t really blame them, because publishing organizations like Relevant aren’t the problem. They get paid when people read and share their stuff. If people are reading and sharing articles about calling, it pays to write about calling.
But I have one major issue with this—a cart-before-the-horse sort of issue.
If there is a calling, there must be a caller. And if the caller gives you a calling, would it not make sense to know the caller, more so than knowing any specific thing about what calling might be all about? I think so. Os Guinness takes a similar stance in his book The Call, a book I’d recommend.
I believe this is the most overlooked, under-discussed aspect of calling. We’ve gotten the subject all turned around. It won’t take long to find an unending supply of opinions about how to find your calling. But finding intimacy with the one who calls? That doesn’t quite meet the immediate need, and it certainly doesn’t sell ads.
It may be that the thing we need most is the thing we’ve overlooked to find a more satisfying short-term answer. The itch has been scratched, and all we’re left with is a bigger itch.
This is one reason why I unapologetically encourage our church to take a long gaze at the expanse and power of God every week as we gather. Scripture presents us with a constant theme: it is only from that place of seeing the expanse and power of God that we begin to understand our place.
It’s not so much that we don’t know enough about calling to truly understand the call, it’s that we don’t know the Caller, and therefore can’t see where He is pointing.
(Image: Digital Nomad)
