A Calling

/ joseph elon lillie

I love what I do and I love the way I am doing it now.

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Getting here has been a life’s journey. I have always felt called to this thing called ministry (well since I was twelve anyway). The calling is necessary. The calling keeps you going when you don’t love what you’re doing or the way you’re doing it.

Honestly, there have been many times I have not loved the ministry. There have been even more times when I did not love the way I was doing ministry. I thought about giving it up more than once. I even tried it a couple of times. The calling did it’s job and called me back.

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I’ve had jobs before. I’ve even had what I would consider careers before. The ministry is not either of those things and I guess it’s both. It is a calling. It has a job component and it consumes more than enough time and energy to qualify as a career. Still, there is more to it more than job, more than a career. Ministry has an element of destiny attached to it, a hope a predestined future.It’s not a fate you can’t escape, but a direction you shouldn’t try to escape.

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I have embraced the call, I have made peace with the call, I have come to love the call.

Ministry is my call, my destiny. What is yours?

5 thoughts on “A Calling”

  1. My call – or vocation – all came at the same time. When I was twenty five. It took me a quarter of a century to understand that I was meant to be a teacher and then to get married. Until I met my husband I had always thought I would eventually end up as a nun. I do ought hard against that – I was no saint— but I really believed that was what would happen. But then I met this young man. Within two weeks we knew we were going to get married and did two weeks after that. Marriage is a special vocation. I felt liberated and bound. Very paradoxical but we have been together almost 45 years now. It’s not always been easy, but it was always the right thing to do

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  2. As I stepped back from my work, I’ve thought that what would make a good day for me would be time out in nature with my camera – walking, canoeing, birding – which truly do make for wonder-filled days. And yet, I’ve come to realize that it’s really the call that comes from within to respond to calls from my town – opportunities to engage with others and with ideas for our community and its people. I think you’ve had notes on similar themes recently. There is something in a title of Margaret Wheatley’s book “Who Do We Choose To Be?” … a sense that in hearing and responding to a true calling, we make this choice. I don’t know what to name my “calling” … for now, I’ll call it “Living”

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    • I think there is a lot to be said for having and answering a “life call”. One thing it has done for me is bathe the rest of life: the big and small things, the god and bad things, the seemingly important things and the obviously mundane things in a light of certain contentment≥

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      • Yes, I’d say that is also the experience I’m having. It’s good to recognize and to not be wondering about what I’m not doing, or what else I “should” be doing. Makes for a nicer flow, a more seamless life

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