The call of God in my life
A few of my learnings from serving in my local church as an intern…
So over the past few months I’ve been interning in church as part of my journey in realising my perceived calling into full-time Christian ministry. As part of this learning process, my youth pastor tasked me with reading segments of Oswald Chambers’ book, “So I Send You”, and I was to journal down my thoughts and reflections and thereafter talk it through with her. This piece is hence a summary of what I gleaned from the book together with a few of my personal experiences from my internship in church…
1. The call of God doesn’t reflect my nature, but God’s.
Oswald Chambers talks about how many people make the mistake of considering their temperament or personality when they try to discern their calling. He starts off by laying down the fundamental fact that the call of God reflects His nature, and not mine. The moment I start to think about how my strengths and weaknesses affect God’s call for me, it gets difficult for me to hear God. I feel that this is true when it comes to me, and I’ve since been trying to lay aside my convictions about who I am and what God is calling me to be. A segment in the second chapter in the book reads,
“We make a blunder when we fix on the particular location for our service and say, ‘God called me there.’ When God shifts the location, the battle comes. Will I remain consistent to what I have said I am going to do, or be true to the insurgent call of God, and let Him locate me where He likes?”
I struggle really hard with this because I’ve always been searching for my calling with questions like, “Am I going to be a pastor?” or “Am I going to be a missionary?”, and it’s only now that I realise that I’ve been asking the wrong questions all along. It’s difficult because this mindset is so deeply rooted in me (and it also sucks to never really know until God wants me to know), but I’m slowly learning to try to simply be in tune with God as the prophet Isaiah was when he was commissioned, and go wherever He leads me.
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!””
Isaiah 6:8 NIV
2. The call of God is not just a call to a vocation.
It is that in part, but it is also more than that. It is a call to certain kind of life. More specifically, it is a call to preach the gospel in every aspect of life. Whether it is in my family, relationships, hobbies or vocations, I am called to represent Christ in everything I do, and this is the first and foremost call of God for every Christian. As the apostle Paul puts it, “For when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, since I am compelled to preach.” Prior to reading this, I was so focused on specifically my calling in my vocation that I felt that I had missed the point. It was telling when I read this segment in the book that challenged its readers, “Is there anything competing for our strength in our devotion to the call of God?” My first reaction to this was, “Isn’t this quite definite? Won’t there always be things that compete for my strength? How then do I reconcile this?”, and it was only when I read it a second time later that day that I realised that the only reason I thought this way was because I had seen “calling” as something that was restricted to my career alone, and I had subconsciously categorized my life into “spiritual” and “non-spiritual” things. There was this disconnect between career and the rest of my life, and in that sense it was difficult for me to have fulfilled God’s calling for my life as a whole. I need to start to consciously crush this mindset that God’s calling is restricted to my career alone and every aspect of my life should instead be lived out for the glory of God.
3. ALL circumstances ARE used by God to make me a more effective minister in God’s kingdom.
Not some circumstances, but all. Not “can be used”, but “are used”. Prior to reading this book, I was always of the mindset that God could use all circumstances to make me, as Oswald Chambers puts, more effective “broken bread and poured out wine”, but I wasn’t so sure if He did actually work through ALL circumstances. I think this is where my lessons from the book got personal to me, because it was this segment, along with the chapter “Vison, Valley, Verify” that have helped me to make sense of what I’ve been feeling through these few weeks of internship in church. In general over the past few weeks, I’ve felt a great disconnect with the youth congregation; I feel like there’s a discrepancy between what is expected of me as an intern versus what I know I’m capable of. I believe that it is because in contrast to the congregation’s “expectations” of an intern, I came out of nowhere and had no prior significant experience with serving in church. My church’s youth don’t really know me as a person, and I think that has made it really difficult for me to contribute as much as I would like to. One of the instances where this was made apparent to me was during my church’s Youth Leaders’ Meeting last Sunday, where I felt that this much was expected of me in the absence of my youth congregation’s full-time executive staff, but I couldn’t live up to it. It was my first leader’s meeting, and the things at which I felt completely inadequate at ranged from the bigger things like finding it difficult to talk to many of the other youth leaders (christian ministry after all is one that is centred on the souls of people) to small and technical things like not knowing how the room was to be set up. It was in part humbling, but on top of this, a huge part of me was immensely discouraged because I felt completely lost, and for the first time in many years, incompetent at something that genuinely mattered to me. I felt out of touch with the youth community in church and was at a loss at how I could connect with the people I had set out to minister to. At that point, I did the exact thing that I had promised myself to not do and questioned God. Why did my journey have to involve me falling out of church? It makes things for me so much harder now. Still, I spent the next few days in reflection of this experience, and it yielded yet more lessons for me in life and ministry:
I’ve learnt that everyone pursuing God’s calling goes through times of trial to verify their vision. As Oswald Chambers puts it,
“It is when we are going through the valley to prove whether we will be the choice ones that most of us turn tail.”
Will I be one of those who turn tail because of such trials in ministry? Or will I choose to persist in being battered into “shape and use” for God’s purposes?
Lastly, I’ve come to realise I am truly incompetent, and I lack in so many aspects that actually matter in ministry. At the end of the day reading about how God works in my circumstances and lack won’t magically make my difficulties go away; I am still struggling with building godly relationships in church and with the big questions about calling and life. Despite all this, I am now acutely aware of the small ways in which God is working in my life. I am encouraged to know that in the light of the small, mundane moments in office and my recent bigger discouragements, that God is working and using all of these things to show me the way and draw me closer to Him. After all, part of the workings of trials is to show me more of Jesus and less of me, and it is in my lack that God’s power is made perfect.
For those who have read this to the end, thanks for reading! It is with the hope that this short sharing of mine will be a testimony of God’s grace to others (regardless of how incoherent I think it sounds), and that somehow, some way, He will speak through this. God bless! :)
