President or Paleontologist
Our choosing and God’s choice.
On the way home from school recently, my four-year-old daughter suddenly offered the following assessment of her future: “When I grow up, I’m going to be the president…or maybe a paleontologist. I haven’t decided yet.”
Nothing remarkable here really. I feel like most kids consider “President” a strong contender among the candidates for their future careers. “Paleontologist” often makes the short list too — and thanks to the hit PBS show Dinosaur Train, with Dr. Scott the Paleontologist, young kids are even learning to pronounce the word (while being entirely misled about how much trains are actually involved in the study of ancient reptiles).
Even though her choices weren’t remarkable, Henry stepped in to make a remark: “You should probably choose paleontologist, Addie. To be president, you have to get people to choose you, and that seems like a lot of work and not fun.”
I loved his presumption that Addie could get people to choose her — that wasn’t the issue. It was just a lot of work and not very fun. I also liked his very accurate summary what it means to run for president. I suppose the 12 months prior to a presidential election are so full of human judgment and choice that it’s hard to miss what’s going on, even when you’re five years old.
Though not as obvious or overwhelming as the presidential election, most jobs involve getting people to choose you. Not the entire US electorate, of course, but somebody. Paleontologists have to get people — faculty hiring committees, museum administrations, grant committees — to choose them. Even those of us whose professions are termed “vocations” face this reality. Vocation comes from “vocare” — Latin for “to call” — and God may well have done the calling, but there are a whole lot of bishops, ordination committees, and search committees that do a whole lot of choosing.
Whatever the extent of it, getting people to choose you is fraught with frustration, fear, and anxiety. It can be scary, unfair, and humiliating — and that’s when you get chosen! Not getting chosen can bring defeat, depression, and despair.
So there’s plenty of getting people to choose you in life — presidential candidate or not. And Henry was right: it’s a lot of work and not very fun.
This is why it’s so important to remember that to be a Christian, you don’t have to get anyone to choose you. God’s already done it. He’s already chosen you. Ephesians 1:4 states the matter clearly:
God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.”
Yet many people seem to live as though being a Christian were like a divine job interview or election: to be Christian we have to get God to choose us by living the right sort of life. Can’t you imagine the campaign posters:
That’s simply not true; God’s already chosen! We can reject his choice, but we neither need to, nor could, run a campaign to get elected.
What’s more, God’s choosing looks very different from human choosing. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27–28).
(Note: This description is the exact opposite of how we choose candidates in an election cycle, which is why it is spiritually exhausting (and dangerous) to spend so much time as a society judging other human beings by worldly standards.)
Despite our language (“When I grow up I want to be…”), the things we do — president or paleontologist — are not the things we are. Even when called by God to a specific labor, those professions are things we choose and are choosen by others to do.
But what we are is God’s beloved sons and daughters. And that was God’s choice.
What we do is the product of human choice. What we are is the product of God’s.
— Fr. Dad
