Lesson 2

There’s a story about a man who appears at the pearly gates. St. Peter
meets him there and asks him, “Have you ever done anything of particular
merit?”

“Well, I can think of one thing” the man says. “Once I came upon a gang
of high-testosterone bikers who were threatening a young woman. I directed them
to leave her alone, but they wouldn’t listen. So I approached the largest and
most heavily-tattooed biker. I smacked him on the head, kicked his bike over,
ripped out his nose ring, threw it on the ground and said, ‘Leave her alone now
or you’ll answer to me!’”

St. Peter was impressed. He said, “When did this happen?”

“A few minutes ago.”

There’s a big difference between faith and foolishness. Two weeks ago, we talked about taking big risks to follow God. Today, we’re going to talk about a few things to think about before taking that step. Because first we have to discern the call.

Now, hopefully, no one is going, “Great! I wish he had covered this before I put in for that transfer to Uganda!”

Ok, so maybe I should have at least told you we were going to cover discerning the call before I showed you Carpe Diem and all that. But, um, if you’re moving to Boise, well, I’ll help you pack. Hope that works out.

Really this whole business about receiving a call from God is a little uncertain for me. I grew up in a Baptist church where the whole idea of receiving a call is shrouded in mystery. Baptists talk about being “called into the ministry.” When a pastor is interviewing at a church he goes to preach “in view of a call”. Which really just means to see if the church likes his preaching. I grew up in First Baptist Booker where, on a really good day, there are 100 people at church. I noticed that the people that were “called” to be pastor there were always 26 years old and fresh out of seminary. I noticed that God never called W.A. Criswell or Ed Young or Andy McQuitty to be pastor of FBC Booker. So I have to admit that I come to this calling thing with some baggage.

Not only that, for most of my life, I’ve been a terribly indecisive. Especially with big decisions. The bigger the decision, the more I want to chew on it. I didn’t choose a major until the university told me they would no longer allow me to call myself “undecided”. I had 60 hours at that point.

So for me to teach about hearing a call is a little like me teaching on Platectonics. But I did read the book so I can tell you what Ortberg says.

First, he says that everybody has a calling.

Over the past 2 ½ years, I have assembled more toys and high chairs and stuff than in 30 years before that. It’s always a little concerning when I get finished putting together some baby gear, especially the safety-related kind, and there are parts left over. Certainly, I know that these can’t be the result of mistakes in my assembly, so they must be spare parts that the factory worker threw in just in case I wasn’t so masterfully good with my hands. They are spare parts. They don’t have a role, no purpose, no function in helping the toy bring a smile or the seat bring safety to my babies. They’re worthless.

This is not how God works. He doesn’t keep spare parts around in case one of his soldiers craps out. We all have a role to play, a mission to fulfill. We’re all uniquely designed to serve a purpose.
But of course, we have to discover what that purpose is. When assembling a high chair, it won’t do to put a ¾” nut on a ½” bolt. We have to know where the master intended us to serve. Where we fit in the plan.

Now as far as what your calling is, that’s between you and God. There’s no way for me to tell you what God will call you to. That’s part of what makes getting out of the boat risky and exciting. But there are a few parameters we can put on it.

First, God’s call will be a reflection of his character. Obviously, that means He won’t call you to do something immoral. God didn’t tell Andrea Yates to drown her children. But it also means that his call is likely to both inspire and discipline you toward being more like him.

It will not necessarily be easy. It will involve work. Paul Minear says, “The God of the Bible is pre-eminently a worker.”

I think he’s right. Think of all the metaphors the Bible uses to describe God: gardener, artist, potter, shepherd, king, homemaker, builder. Not really a sit-on-the-couch-watch-Oprah-and-eat-Bon-Bons kind of diety.

Finally, God’s call will likely honor your raw material. You were made with a purpose in mind – no spare parts, remember? So we have to figure out what our design is?

Your calling will likely be the convergence of your gifts and God’s mission.
Frederich Buechner wrote that calling is “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” If we were in a conference room and not the middle school room, we’d call this a win-win.

Discussion Question:
Reflect on all of your life experiences. When have you ever experienced deep gladness in serving someone’s deep need?

When thinking about that, it’s important to distinguish what I love doing for its own sake from what I want to do because of the rewards it may bring me. Ask yourself,

• “Do I like to do this because it stirs my soul or because it makes me a lot of money?”
• “Do I want this job because when I do this work I feel my giftedness come alive, or because when I get this job people will think I have it all together?”
• “Do I teach because God has called me to teach or because teaching makes people think I know what I’m talking about?”

A good test of your motives is to ask yourself if you would do the same job if the money or position or accolades didn’t come with it.

• Would you still perform the same service if it didn’t have a higher pay scale?
• Would you be enthusiastic about the position if no one knew your title?
• Would you teach if no one paid attention to your teaching?

I was in Washington D.C. this week and got to see, for the first time, all of the sites there, including the Capitol building. Near the west front of the Capitol, looking down the National Mall toward the monument to our first president, is a statue of our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant. It’s ironic that Grant’s monument is right there under the shadow of the political dome, because Grant hated politics.

Grant’s raw material was perfectly suited for military command. He was a brilliant military leader, strategist, and writer. His Memoirs are considered a classic of military literature. But he was horribly equipped for business and politics. He never mastered the “art of compromise.” He neither understood nor enjoyed life in Washington.

While he was undoubtedly one of the most accomplished military leaders in U.S. history, some historians judge him one of the least effective presidents in our history. And he knew it. Listen In his final State of the Union address, he said:

“It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of the Chief
Executive without any previous political training.”

He knew he was cut out for the combat, not compromise. So why did he take the job as president? We can’t know his mind, but could it be that he was thinking more of the things he would enjoy that would be brought by the job, than the chances that he might enjoy the job itself? Could it be that he wasn’t thinking of his calling, but was thinking of getting his face on a dollar bill?

Even without anyone offering us the presidency, it’s difficult to come to an honest and accurate assessment of ourselves, to obey Paul’s statement to regard yourself with “sober judgment.” To shoot straight about your passions, gifts, and limits. It requires tremendous self-awareness. You don’t know yourself as well as you might think.

So Ortberg gives us some tips for discerning God’s call before we go leaping out of the boat.

Assemble a Clearness Committee
To assess yourself accurately, you might need the help of others to overcome some “blind spots.” That’s especially true if you’re facing a difficult or big decision.

The Quakers have a tradition where, faced with an important decision about a calling, they gather a half-dozen friends to serve as a “clearness committee.” That is, a committee of friends who will pray and listen with you to help you be clear about God’s call. Ortberg addresses this tradition at length.

The purpose of a clearness committee is not to solicit advice from people. You’ll get plenty of advice without seeking it. And it’s not a chance for others to promote their agenda for your life (well, son, your mother and I think God is calling you to move the grandkids into the vacant house next door to us!)

The primary job of a clearness committee is to ask questions, listen thoughtfully, and then pray for a sense from God of his calling. I need people to ask me tough questions like these:
What do you enjoy doing for its own sake?
What do you avoid doing? Why?
For what do you wish to be remembered?
How might the offer of money or promotion sidetrack you from you calling?
What would your life look like if it turned out well?

Discussion Question:
What limitation that’s part of your “raw material” is most painful for you?

Conduct Low-Cost Probes
Arthur Miller is the kind of guy you might expect to be quoted in a book about getting out of the boat. He’s a counter-culture, free-thinking poet. He wrote this:

It is wrong, it is sin, to accept or remain in a position that you know is a
mismatch for you. Perhaps that’s a form of sin you’ve never even considered –
the sin of staying in the wrong job. But God did not place you on this earth to
waste away your years in labor that does not employ his design or purpose for
your life, no matter how much you may be getting paid for it.

But if you know your current job or ministry or house or budget is wasting God’s resources, but you’re not sure how to change, then Ortberg suggests taking some “test drives”. Maybe a short-term mission trip or volunteering nights with a new ministry. To test your effectiveness in that area. To see if you can find the place where deep gladness meets deep need.

Now, I have to admit that my first reaction upon reading this was, “Hey, that doesn’t sound like getting out of the boat. It sounds more like dipping your toes into the water.” In fact, there’s something that still doesn’t set right with me when we talk about “low-cost” in association with “stepping out on faith.” I think in most cases in life, those who have little to lose also stand little to gain. So if the circumstances of your relationship with God leave you feeling that you should jump head-first out of the boat, then I’d say it’s time to jump, but the idea of low-cost probes is not a bad one. In fact, if you read the account of Peter’s water walking closely, you’ll notice that it was Peter’s idea but he didn’t step out until Jesus made the formal offer. Peter tested it by saying, “Lord, if it’s really you, command me to come to you on the water.” So there is some precedent there for probing the call.

Get Ready: A Calling Often Involves Pain
If you've ever gone through Heny Blackaby's Experiencing God, you might remember this:

Some people say, “God will never ask me to do something I can’t do.” I have come
to the place in my life that, if the assignment I sense God is giving me is
something that I know I can handle, I know it is probably not from God. The kind
of assignments God gives in the Bible are always God-sized. They are always
beyond what people can do, because he wants to demonstrate his nature, his
strength, his provision, and his kindness to his people and to a watching world.
This is the only way the world will come to know him.”

Think about when God called Abraham to leave home or Gideon to lead an army, or Esther to defy a king, or Mary to give birth to the Messiah. Their initial responses were never, “Yeah, ok God. I think I can handle that. Sounds like a plan.”

Now, that’s not to say that God’s calling always betrays your interests or your raw material. But it is to say that we shouldn’t expect the walking to be easy when we get out of the boat.

Nor is it to say that your calling and career have to be one and the same. But it is to say that if we have to choose between the two, we should choose the one that fills our purpose, not the one that fills our bank account.

Discussion Question:
How clear are you about your sense of calling? Try writing one or two compelling sentences to finish this phrase:
My calling is …

The Carolyn Arrends song says:

I know a doctor, a fine young physician.
Left his six-figure job for a mission position.
He's healin' the sick in an African clinic.
He works in the dirt and writes home to the cynics.
He says we work through the night so most every day
As we watch the sunrise we can say, Seize the day!

Apparently, the fine young physician lives in Dallas, at least for a few more weeks. Read Jacquielynn Floyd's story here or below about one guy who is really out of the boat.

AIDS-haunted Africa beckons
By JACQUIELYNN FLOYD / The Dallas Morning News
Dr. Mike Tolle is giving up his practice in Richardson to take his family to Lesotho to fight the AIDS pandemic.

RICHARDSON – Mike Tolle is about to start his dream job, but he's giving up an awful lot in return. On Wednesday, he'll quit a lucrative medical practice, leaving the patients who have grown to love him. He and his wife are saying goodbye to family and friends. They're moving out of the Lake Highlands house they cherish, leaving the neighborhood where their year-old son, Sebastian, has just gotten old enough to start making friends.

In barely a month, Dr. Tolle will be living and working at the epicenter of the starkest and saddest reality on the planet: the AIDS epidemic that is destroying southern Africa like an apocalyptic inferno.

"I guess my hobby is medical mission work," he told me when we met in his cramped, book-strewn office. He's not kidding – it's what he does for fun. (In a distinctly un-doctorlike move, he insisted on taking the guest chair while I sat behind his desk, where it was easier to take notes).

Dr. Tolle, a young-looking 37, is a rare hybrid of ambitious idealist and sturdy pragmatist. He has no illusions about the difficulty of loosening the terrible grip AIDS holds on Africa. But he considers it a moral obligation to roll up his sleeves and start trying.

"I don't mean to be too angry, but it's a bit of a disgrace that people are dying of a treatable illness," he said. "Southern Africa is just being crushed."
Dr. Tolle will be one of 50 U.S. physicians in an "international pediatric AIDS corps" being trained and deployed by the Houston-based Baylor College of Medicine (there's more information at www.bayloraids.org).

They'll be the first wave in what the program intends as a succession of medical practitioners who will live in the most AIDS-stricken nations, treating patients and training local medical personnel to manage the disease.

It's a big step, but Dr. Tolle has plenty of experience in hands-on international public medical work. He has been on medical missions to Central America and the Caribbean as well as Africa, sometimes taking along student volunteers from his own alma mater, Dallas' Jesuit High School.

He met his wife, Lorena, while working in El Salvador. Lorena, who was orphaned by that nation's painful civil war, was a driving force behind the little family's decision to relocate to Lesotho (Le-SOO-too), a small nation completely landlocked by the Republic of South Africa.

Dr. Tolle can recall the precise day – the hour, really – when he made the mental jump to the idea of moving permanently to Africa.
"I don't want to say one day can affect the future of your whole life," he said. "But it can."

It was on a previous trip to Zambia, where he was with a small medical group that traveled to the countryside. There, he found a ghost village where the only healthy residents were children or elderly people – all the young adult population was either sick or already dead.

"You had invisible people dying silently in their huts," he said. The children were bewildered, but the teenagers were seething.

"They're angry and frustrated," he said. "They know there's something that can be done about AIDS, and that it's not being done in their country."

The sheer numbers are hard to grasp in the U.S., where comparative wealth and new drug therapies have made AIDS a largely manageable, if chronic disease.
In the hard-hit nations of southern Africa, AIDS is a plague, a pandemic. The disease has reversed life expectancy, rolling it back in several countries to 1950s levels. Depopulation by death has wrecked the traditional rural social structure, which endured for centuries.

Here's what I really admire about Dr. Mike Tolle: He does not lecture or hector. He doesn't deliver any finger-wagging political tirades. But he is one of those rare people who cannot look at a tragedy or an injustice and just shrug and put it out of his head. It's a matter of simple logic to him that if something needs to be done, it makes sense to get to work.

Conscience, idealism, call it what you like. In a dark and troubled world, Dr. Michael Tolle is a calm and steady light.