Hello! I wrote this blog post a little while back on my personal blog (tinyurl.com/richinwhaat), but I thought it was pretty relevant, so here you go!
“CALLED”
I’ve always felt awkward saying things like “I feel called to do (specific action/ministry/job).“
It’s weird because, in the Christian community, I hear the phrase all of the time…but what does it even mean? Welp, lucky for me, in the the Bible, “calling” happens ALL THE TIME.
For the sake of this blog post, I really want to focus on “being called to (insert specific action/ministry/job here)” as apposed to “God calling on the name of (insert name here)”, “someone being called (insert adjective/name/possessive pronoun here)”, and “someone calling on the name of the Lord (praying/worship).”
SO. Let’s get into it.
Here are my big questions:
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What does it even feel like to be called by God?
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Am I not already called? (mission/spreading the gospel/sharing His glory)
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Why are there so many different definitions of the word???
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How do you/can you even know if you are being called to something?
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What about people who say they are called to something, but then the thing they were supposedly “called” to falls through? Were they really called? Is that circumstantial? Can we even say??
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What is the criteria needed to claim “I am called to (blah)?”
I’m the type of person who feels most comfortable accepting something only after it can be proven to me. So… the whole metaphysical “calling” has always made me pretty uncomfortable–even as a believer.
So I’m going to do my best to answer these questions over the next few months.
-August 2018
Hello! It’s currently late March (2019), and I’ve learned a few things/got some questions answered.
Question: What does it even feel like to be called by God?
After some diligent prayer, lessons learned, and time spent exploring my strengths and weaknesses, I feel confident in my answer to this question. Answering this first question really helped me answer these other questions as well.
It feels like this: Knowing/learning the scriptures, spending large portions of time with other believers and with the presence of God…Just living your life.
It produces this: Passion for the Lord and loving others.
That’s it. There’s no specific vocation, destination, person, or thing. Just an unsettlingly vague trust of the Lord. WhIcH is a gOod THiNg!
Those might be some pretty controversial statements there, but I feel like they need to be said you know? I know so many people who have been “called” to something and then let down big time/just quit pursuing God altogether because they had this ridiculously distorted expectation of how God is going to work in their life.
More often than not though, this danger goes unnoticed and it’s so easy to point fingers at satan and honestly… just dismiss the problem rather than struggling through it. The real problem is that we are conditioned to NOT question these Christianese clichés, and we lack the follow-through to withstand the tribulation and uncertainty required of a Christ follower.
