Our Deepest Vocation

(Source)

The week or so since I posted Deeply Troubled has not been a particularly promising one.  It has become, if anything, rather worse - so much worse, in fact, that I have elected to give up almost all forms of news and social media, both for my own sanity as well to maintain a consistency of commitment that I have given to others:  If I truly am not going to discuss and follow the news, then I need to avoid surreptitiously doing it on the side - if they will honour my ask, I too need to honor my own commitment.

On the bright side, my stress level has dropped, my phone battery lasts longer, and I am not doing all the nervous ticks that I do on the side when I am stressed.

That does not change the fact, however, that I need to model something different.

I am aware that "modeling" may not seem like the greatest need.  And yet, every day I become even more convinced that one of the major issues we face is that there remains a dearth of people - on all sides of the issue - that can model the sort of behaviour that we wish to see in the world.

As a Christian, of course, I can reasonably only be expected to reflect the Christian experience.  And that is where the above quote from Henri Nouwen comes in.

Every Christian has, in some way, caught glimpses of God.  Some of them are equivalent of towering thunderheads and majestic sunsets, others as quiet and innocuous as rainfall or a bumble bee on a flower.  But all, in some way, have seen these glimpses.

The world desperately needs this glimpses.

I am fortunate, if that is the world to use:  I have a confidence that at times is completely unexplainable to someone who does not believe - not all the time of course, and usually a very restrained confidence (I cannot shake who I am at my core). And part of that is fueled by those glimpses of God that I have had and, in turn, can live out in my life.

I have been the beneficiary of God's love in the love and kindness of others.  I have been the beneficiary of God's goodness in the fact I have always had a roof over my head and food on my table.  I have been the beneficiary of God's grace through the forgiveness of others.

I have been given so much.  It is my job to share it with the world as best I can.

That is not just my job, I would argue.  It is the job of every Christian.  It is what the world desperately needs at this moment, more than any of the other things that are filling the news at the moment.

No matter what else is going on, the world still needs God.  To the extent that Christians, each in their own way, reveal those glimpses of Him to the world, we fulfill the deepest calling of every Christian:  To make God known.