Called
Please give your name and reason for calling. I’ll admit—I can be a bit old school. Even so, while I’m not one to require the latest smartphone, I’ve learned to stay somewhat relevant in the fast-changing world of technology. I have to be honest, though. That one took me by surprise.
It had been a long day (along with a long week and an even longer month) in the school where I teach. Intending to leave thirty minutes prior, I now found myself on the phone returning a parent’s call.
Maybe it was the culmination of too many demands of the job and too little time in the school day. Or maybe it was the fact that I was uncertain as to how the call would go. Either way, listening to the automated call screener, I had a moment. Internally, I rolled my eyes and thought, It’s one thing to screen my call. It’s another thing to tell me you’re screening my call—especially when you called me!
I like not being tied to the unknown when it comes to deciding whether or not I am going to answer my phone. If I’m honest, I also screen my calls at times. But my experience that day reminded me just how much technology has allowed us to filter, redirect, or refuse what doesn’t align with the mood in the moment.
Leaving a message unread.
Sending a call to voicemail.
Endless scrolling with minimal engagement.
What may begin as a necessary response to a world filled with scams and constant overstimulation can keeps us dialed in to our own needs, while at the same time keeping us from relational commitment.
Despite the promised pragmatism of cell phones, communication isn’t convenient. It requires something of us. To make a call is the choice to connect; to answer one is the willingness to be available.
Our Love is Our Yes
In times past, I would have defined God’s call as a significant life decision—decisions like beginning a relationship, choosing a vocation, or moving to a different community to put down roots. Today, while I still see the ways in which God calls to us in those areas, I have learned that the call of God isn’t only in the major moments.
He calls to me in the everyday. And my response is the demonstration of my love.
I was raised with a strong sense of the worthiness of God, and while I was in large part taught that He is loving and kind, I also grew up fighting feelings of obligation. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to obey. Rather, it was a sense inside me that it was the “right” thing to do—and with that expectation came a distinct fear of disappointing God.
There is a distinct difference, though, between answering a call because we have to and doing so because we cannot wait to do so.
In the monumental and the mundane, His heart calls us to His own, and with that, He calls us to love Him in every decision, every commitment, every desire.
Comparison Distracts
One of my favorite passages in C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy is a scene where one of the characters asks Aslan about the events of another character’s life. With firm but gentle redirection, Aslan reminds him that the only story he is to live is his own.
Gazing at other peoples’ lives is a diversionary tactic we, too, are guilty of practicing.
Rather than going to the deep places of examining our hesitancy or even our outright resistance to whatever it is that God might be calling us to do, we begin looking to the right and to the left to see if God has been fair.
Distracted, when God is trying to tell us our story and we’re busy asking Him about someone else’s, we miss the point (John 21:15–22). It’s really difficult to live in His mercy and His grace when we’re busy comparing what God is doing in our lives to what He is doing in someone else’s. Measuring our sense of purpose, and even our worth, we look at the matrix of someone else’s life to determine whether or not we agree with what God has placed or allowed in ours.
His purpose, His call, in us is about loving Him with every part of who we are. It is our unhindered, unscreened, undistracted yes.
God doesn’t ask us to live someone else’s life. He asks us to give Him ours.
All is Lost
The gospel—the life-giving good news—is also a message of death. To accept the call of Christ—from the moment of salvation until the moment we leave this world—is also to face death. Like Paul, the apostle, this is the call of God on our lives: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the [life] which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20, New American Standard Bible). There is no more beautiful way to die—or to live.
Faithful.
All In.
Called.
—Written by Regina Franklin. Used by permission from the author.
