A Continuous Calling

One of my high school teachers talked to me about what I should do with the rest of my life. He said, “You can become a specialist and know a lot about one thing and very little about everything else, or a generalist and know a little bit about everything and very little about one thing.”

From that point on, I’ve wavered between both options. Even though our temperaments are not the same, my mother was like that. She could write well, train horses, cook and garden with the best of them, make quilts, took courses in photography, oil painting and invisible mending, but didn’t grab unto any of those things for very long.

Sometimes I dearly envy those whose calling in life seems clear. The apostle Paul knew his direction in life. In Galatians 1, he says, “But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went to Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter . . . .”

He heard the call of God, spent a few years alone getting full directions and learning exactly how to fulfill that call, then spent his life doing it.

Other writers that I know are making business plans, or have a plan for their career that includes projects for this year. Many of my friends seem to know their direction and have set themselves toward it.

In contrast, God asks me to listen to Him every minute for what I’m to do. I’ve no big plan, no major project, only a myriad of choices that require moment-by-moment directions. I don’t know how well I’d do with the big plan, but I know the difficulty of this one. For instance, if I don’t listen, my day seems a total waste of time.

Paul was called to preach Jesus to the Gentiles. That involved many steps and choices about where to go, how to approach people, who to have on his team. No doubt He had to keep his ears open for the details, so in that, I can relate.

Today my to-do list has about fifteen items. God may tell me to postpone some of them, to add a new one or two, to do them in a certain order, to be flexible, to be rigid. Or something might happen that forces me to abandon all of them. I feel like a pretzel. I’m sure Paul did too, at times.

There is one other thing that Paul and I have in common. It is the purpose of God “to reveal His Son in me” just as He did with him. For me, it will never be through building churches and preaching to Gentiles, but there are myriad ways to demonstrate the beauty of Jesus Christ. One of them is by simply listening to my Father and joyfully doing whatever He says, whenever He says it.