How Do I Figure Out What I Am Called To?

We have many young adults (age 18-35) at Faith Lutheran.  In fact, nearly 80 young adults have actually become members of Faith in the last two years.  I am fascinated by my conversations with this age group.  Many of them are very open to stating that they have become involved in church because they want to be more spiritual.

As we go deeper into discussing what exactly that means, what I often discover is that these young folks are beginning to take seriously what God might be calling them to do in life and with their lives.

We don’t begin life with this question.  We arrive at it, and these young adults are arriving there much sooner in life than most people, including most of the folks in my early-stage baby-boomer generation.

In earlier blogs I have talked about Martin Luther King, Jr’s sense of “call,” and in my last blog I talked about “the call” in general.  Now, let’s go a bit deeper.

For me “call” has both an interior and an exterior dimension.  Take, for example, my own sense of call to ministry.  In my high school years I was very involved in Luther League (what we called youth ministry at the time) and in Bible Camping, first as a camper, and then on staff as a counselor.  During those years many folks told me they thought I had the talents and gifts for parish ministry.  That is the exterior dimension: what other people see God calling you to do.

As my own relationship with God grew during those years, I began to feel a sense of call to ministry.  It was not any kind of a blinding flash, like St. Paul or Luther, but just a growing conviction.  It wasn’t that clear or always that strong, but I at least felt I should consider it as a possible calling from God.  That is what I mean by an interior dimension.

As I study the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t think his interior call was that strong in the beginning.  He came from a long line of ministers and he seems just to have gone along that route without a clarity of an interior call.  I don’t know this for sure, but that is what he seems to be saying in his writings.  It was not until his “kitchen crisis” [see 8/9/12 Blog] that that interior relationship became strengthened and clear.

As for his exterior call, an example of that would be when, in a matter of hours, he is asked to be the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association [see 8/6/12 Blog].  People saw his gifts for leadership, he accepted, and it changed from that time on the nature of his understanding of call to ministry.  He would spend less time in parish ministry and more and more time leading the Civil Rights Movement as it sought change through non-violent, direct action.

What complicates things further is that our sense of call is going to change over time.  Since call is the bringing together of our gifts and the needs of the world, as those gifts change and the world changes, our call will also change.  Some of the most confusing times in my life have been when I sensed my call was changing, but I wasn’t sure in what ways, or what I should do next.  More on that later.

For now, please share your thoughts on how you understand “call” in your life, and what you are experiencing in terms of both the inner and outer call.

And, if you would like to be a part of a face-to-face discussion of your sense of call, using the Civil Rights Movement as a case study, I will be teaching a class this year that will meet once a month, with identical sessions on a Thursday evening and a Saturday morning.  Please email me for details (pastorbrian@flcva.org)