What's my calling?

This week is our second week of Kadesh (high school age leadership camp) and it has been really thought provoking. I hope to have time to sit down and write about the things we’ve discussed and insights I’ve learned from the leaders and kids. Today though I want to talk about an idea that was mentioned briefly this week, but that I feel many young people are struggling with.

What are you going to do when you grow up? What’s your major going to be? What’s my calling? These are questions that plaque the younth of America. My brother is 15 and already has planned where he wants to get his undergraduate and masters from because he is choosing a career path in high school because of the IB program. When did 15 year olds start making these kinds of decisions, because I don’t remember making them when I was 15. Our society is putting more and more pressure on kids to have everything “figured out”.

At ACU I have many friends who have graduated or are still in school and searching for their “calling”. There is so much pressure that if they don’t have it all planned out, if they don’t pick that perfect career today that they won’t be successful. We are all searching for God’s calling in our life and so I want to take a moment to talk about what this word “calling” means. Because of the pressures that society is putting on us I believe that we have blended together our definitions of calling and vocation. In its most basic form our vocation is what we do to pay the bills. You could be a teacher, an accountant, a coach, a janitor, a lawyer but that isn’t necessarily your calling. Our calling is what God is putting on our hearts to do. Donna Stone was speaking at Kadesh this week and she said, “I’ve been fulfilling my calling of working in youth ministry for 24 years, but my vocation, what I do to pay the bills is teach high school”. What a great way to put it.

In her book Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Ruth Hailey Barton says “However, the biblical idea of calling is not easily dismissed. Its meaning is richly layered. In its simplest and most straightforward meaning, the verb to call refers to the capacity living creatures have to call out to one another, to stay connected, to communicate something of importance. Even at this most basic level the dynamic of calling is profound, because it reminds us that calling is first of all highly relational: it has to do with one being (God) reaching out and establishing connection with another (us). It is an interpersonal connection and communication that is initiated by God and thus demands our attention and our response even as a basic courtesy”.

Our calling is to be in relationship with one another. To spread the good news of Jesus no matter what we are doing. There is no need to stress or worry about fulfilling our calling by landing that great job; or going to the perfect graduate school, because those things are not what we are being called to do. They may help us achieve our own goals and create a better quality of life for ourselves and our families, but if we are truly searching for our calling then we should take time to understand that it is something happening in our lives this very moment. Our calling from God is not something that will only be revealed once we’ve landed that job or finished our graduate work, it is waiting for us right now and it does not depend on you having everything in life figured out. So to all my friends and peers I encourage you to take a moment and listen for the call in your life and to begin to pursue it no matter where you are, because to say yes to our calling “is living in the awareness that the most wonderful thing in the world is to be completely given over to a loving God”.