What's a Calling? What's Our Purpose?

The Rev. Dr. William Willimon is an accidental preacher. He's written over 80 books and he was on a recent podcast with Kate Bowler's podcast, Everything Happens Episode 23. How did he become a pastor? "It wasn't my idea."

"We have a God who doesn't take no for an answer..."

In a world that teaches us to follow our bliss, shoot for the stars, don't settle for anything less than your best, figure out what you love to do and do that and you'll never work a day in your life, etc., there is this ancient biblical perspective that has totally gotten lost in the shuffle of all those platitudes and calls for individuality as the gold standard.

We have a life that is not our own. We can find tons of examples in the scriptures but consider the first four that pop into my brain: Moses, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Abraham. Here's what I know. I did not set out to swim in the recovery world. THAT'S the world I vowed to escape as I lay in my bed as a ten year old listening to the crashing of thrown objects against the den wall. I swore I was going to get the 'dys' out of dysfunctional family and never look back. And yet here I am. I am an accidental pastor to a recovery church, a community where the disease of addiction has doubled down and practically required an added heaping of "dys" for the family. The disease does that. I can tell you the facts of how this came to be and how unlikely the events that resulted in this radically changed life experience but I cannot explain how it happened.

"If you cannot explain it some other way, then it might be God," reports Dr. Willimon.

If this is the way God works, then according to Willimon, discernment becomes a very big task. His experience mirrors my own. He says he has days when he is really sure his call is from God and other days when he needs a reminder. The call to be married or someone's friend or a parent or any other role worth having is the same - we go back and forth, wondering: is this my path?

The weird thing about vocation is that it is not our idea; it is God's idea before it was ours. Dr. Willimon's position on such matters is completely foreign to the average American floundering for a sense of purpose and validation for their life choices. An external sense of determination is not a normal way to think about it in North America. When was the last time you heard someone say, "God just tapped me on the shoulder..." Or "I just came to understand the Lord was in this thing." Now, that language has some problems of its own. Sometimes people use God as an excuse to do things that even God wouldn't approve of! But as Willimon points out, there needs to be a definite sense of direction. "I do wonder if for modern Western people like us it's been so long since we have expected address from anything other than our own interiority. Maybe we are a little less adept at saying, 'God's got his hand on me.'" Dr. Will Willimon

At this point, I'm starting to think that maybe we need to think about God's hand on us more often, maybe it would act as a deterrent for putting our hands on other people without their invitation to do so.