God Has Called Me To Do Nothing Good (and Other Lies of the Heart)

It’s really amazing when you think about it. God calls us all to do different things. He takes our gifts, our passions, our loves, our weaknesses, our totality as His creation and then he calls us to do His work.

The beauty of seeing the variety of ways that God’s Body is at work is stunning. I have a friend who records stories of people’s lives. I have a friend who is a teacher. Another who is a pastor. One who sells make-up. One who is a doctor. One who bakes bread.

It’s really amazing when you think about it. God calls us all to do different things. He takes our gifts, our passions, our loves, our weaknesses, our totality as His creation and then he calls us to do His work.

The beauty of seeing the variety of ways that God’s Body is at work is stunning. I have a friend who records stories of people’s lives. I have a friend who is a teacher. Another who is a pastor. One who sells make-up. One who is a doctor. One who bakes bread.

The ugly part, though, is how we rank those callings within the Body of Christ and how we compare ourselves to others. If someone else isn’t telling us we are lesser, well, we’ll tell ourselves that.

Today, I want to remember that God’s callings on all of us are amazing and beautiful and all of equal worth (and if you don’t wanna take my word for it, check out Paul’s more authoritative take on the subject in Romans 12).

So, I want us to start celebrating our own gifts and the gifts of others more. I want us to see that God can call someone to a small town in rural Idaho just as much as He can a small town in rural Cambodia.

We need to give ourselves and others space to hear God and follow God, not tell others we know His will for their lives because they seem to have a "lesser" calling than our own.

Now, I’ve not had a recent experience with this, but I have had some. And I’m not angry or upset. I guess, I just can look back over time and see how those times of confusion and discouragement happened at the hands of well-intentioned people of God who didn’t necessarily mean to say that God had called me to nothing good. It just came across that way.

I can see now that most of the time these people were actually just so incredibly passionate about their own call that they felt everyone should do it too. Whether it was reach out to a certain group of people or do it in a certain manner, they felt that God was more in one way than another—primarily in the way that they were called to go.

I have fallen into this trap. Having gone overseas before, I felt that everything I did while in another country was God’s work. Yes, that’s right, even using the bathroom in another country was holy. Once back in the states, things just weren’t as great as “over there.” I was zealous to get myself and others anywhere but here.

Finally, I came to see that God is not geographically bound and neither is His righteousness—a hard lesson as I wished to go back overseas but it never worked out so far (although may soon, but for different reasons than first imagined).

So, let’s celebrate the call on our life, whatever it may be, and don’t forget the real call is to know God and make Him known. As long as we keep that in mind, I think the one making movies "because no one reads books anymore" and the one writing books "because movies simplify too much" will live in love and harmony.