In the Footsteps of the Few

Our Calling

“This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

I Timothy 2: 3-4 (NIV)

“The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ came to do three things. He came to have my past forgiven, you get a purpose for living and a home in Heaven.”

Rick Warren

It’s inevitable. Sooner or later our lives will be over. The day will come when we will reach the last minute of the last day on the last page of the calendar of our lives. Sooner or later we will all have that single day when ‘tomorrow’ won’t be standing at the ready to become the next ‘today.’

At that point, the daily obligations and challenges that both defined and drove our lives will come to an abrupt end. All of the assorted tasks, the innumerable problems, the incessant obstacles, the various celebrations, the breaking and making of relationships, the paying down of mortgages, the paying out of compliments, and all of the things that consumed both our thoughts and our time will be forevermore concluded.

The Tally of What We Got Done

If all that’s left is an endless litany of tasks accomplished and problems overcome, then the tally of our lives is the tally of what we got done. We suddenly find that we had lived out the sum total of our days bowing to the stale tedium of checklists. We completed a bunch of stuff, most of which didn’t really matter at the end. Yes, it was impressive. But impressive toward what end?

And all of this we had mistakenly taken as living. Life has now fallen into the dramatically expanding backlog of history that tediously records achievements accomplished and dutifully stores them in the catacombs of history as life now completed. We checked the boxes, but did we live?

We live to live life, but not change it. We live to figure out its cadence, not transform it. We live to create a comfortable place, rather than dare to discover our place. We live to be good, but not to be great. We live to win, which means that we’ve forsaken what it is to succeed. We live without a calling because we didn’t deem it of enough importance to ask God what it was and how we fulfill it. We checked a bunch of boxes, but we didn’t live.

A Calling

Do we live solely to check off the relentless list of incessant obligations that life pens on the pages of our lives? Have we drearily defined life as something more of a strictly linear course where we begin at one point and methodically plod in a single direction in single steps until we reach a single point? And if this cycle is the sum total of our existence, is it simply existence that we errantly took for living? Have we chosen to be that ignorant and therefore squander our lives out of that ignorance? And if it is simply existence, have we completely confused authentically robust living with something more akin to a robotic subsistence? And in it all an exhilarating sense of calling is lost.

The Core of a Calling

A calling calls us to charge the world rather than solely walk in blind lockstep with it. A calling declares that a strictly linear course can be majestically swept upward by wonder, breathlessly elevated by vision, and potently energized by faith.

A calling is a brilliant and entirely undimmed vision that breathlessly engages this existence of ours. In the engagement, it loudly declares that there is infinitely more to all of this and that we have been specifically ordained to boldly usher that ‘more’ into our own existence. It is a surrender to the great God of great callings, who has not created a single life without gifting it with a calling in the creating. And in altering our own existence as well as transforming that of others by clothing ourselves in such a calling, we do nothing less than change the whole of our world. That is a calling. That is our calling.

Do I Have a Calling?

We may at times state that we don’t have a calling, or that life has somehow bypassed us in the area of a calling. However, such a view is often birthed of fear and fed by trepidation as we know that a calling will demand sacrifice. Simply put, ignore your calling and you forfeit your life.

The issue is not having a calling. The issue is in boldly setting out to discover it, embracing the whole of if without the fear that its size would impart, and living it out despite the inherent costs that are certain to be ours to endure in accepting it. It is about living above our line of sight. It’s about living beyond the reach of our vision. It’s about living outside of that which provides us comfort.

Identifying Our Calling

One very effective way to identify your calling is to ask yourself what do you spend your time running from? What have you repeatedly avoided? What have you perpetually ignored? What have you persistently pushed off to another day that never becomes ‘the’ day? What is it that have you attempted to replace with a dizzying array of things that never replace it?

It’s not that we don’t understand our calling. In fact, it is our running that evidences the fact that at some level we do understand it. A calling is consuming, demanding, relentless and uncompromising. It will hand you everything you could hope for, but it will demand everything that you hope in. In a world drowning in trinkets marketed as treasure, next to God our calling is the single greatest thing that we could ever hope to engage. And when something so frighteningly magnificent calls, the frailness of our humanity kicks in and we run. Your calling is calling. Are you listening or are you fleeing? Because if you’re fleeing, your will live within the box of fear. If you listen, you’ll never know what a box is.

You will find all of these outlined in my book, “In the Footsteps of the Few – The Power of a Principled Life.” You will find “In the Footsteps of the Few” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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