Myth: "My calling is just to love whoever is in front of me."

Myth:  “My calling is just to love whoever is in front of me.”

Your calling has broader implications for the surrounding culture and what God is doing in the world.  What you can offer is not simply to impact who ever might cross your path at the time.  Don’t underestimate your place in the Story by thinking too casually,  “My calling is just to show God’s love wherever I am.”  It includes that dimension, but more.

God is not casual or haphazard in his efforts to redeem all of creation from the ground up.  If you are too casual about your place in the Story, whole groups of people may live without what you uniquely can offer them.  God doesn’t want to have to send them someone else:  you’re the best fit.  

This isn’t about pressure or guilt – it’s about getting perspective.  Even the devil doesn’t underestimate you. 

“Some Christians prefer to keep their faith to the level of the personal, the relational, the spiritual, and the simple.  I believe that such a view of faith is misguided.  Calling is certainly a truth that touches our personal lives intimately, bit it also touches cultural life potently.  Calling is more than purely cultural, but it is also more than purely personal.” (Os Guinness, The Call)   

Guinness laments further that

“…second only to the joy of knowing [Jesus] has been a sorrow at the condition of those of us today who name ourselves his followers.  If so many of us profess to live the gospel yet are so pathetically marginal  to the life of our societies and so nondescript and inconsequential in our individual lives, is there something wrong with the gospel, or does the problem lie with us?”  ( The Call)

What you are called to individually, is directly tied to what God is currently up to in human history.  It's that important.

The erosion of confidence

"You'll never find the life you're looking for."

...But the sabotage begins with the painful accumulation of thoughts like these:

•  "I didn't think it would turn out like this."
•  "I'm tired of getting hurt.  Maybe it's not worth it."
•  "I know you want this for me, God; but how long, Lord.  How long must it take?!"

It is hard, and it does hurt.  A person can get to the point where the only apparent conclusion is: "I'll never find what I'm looking for-- Why do others find the life they want, but I can't? Did I blow it somewhere? Is God angry?  Am I not hearing him?" And once the lies begin to calcify, some part of our heart begins to shut down. Faith, hope, and love drain out of the cheerless and weary heart.

But it feels so true. Our experience of pain can erode our confidence and hope in a way that only our experience of the moment feels true to us -- All other interpretations of reality get blotted out.  Only the subjective is allowed to be true, and any Perspective that stands outside of us is forgotten.  Faith, hope and love give way to tunnel vision... and something in us dies.

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives"  - Albert Schweitzer

Jesus, what do you know about our Father's heart here that I need to know?  Where does your confidence come from?