I think I feel a little like Jonah. I feel a little like the prophet who has tried, through everything, to get away from a calling that he simply could not escape. Everywhere I go, it lies there, sometimes waiting to be trampled on, sometimes waiting to be adored. It flashes like flood waters, it raps at my door and pounds on my windows. When I walk through the subway’s caverns, I think I see it welling up from underneath the tiles. When I go out to the park, I hear it whispering in the leaves, I see it glistening in the distance. Like the psalmist I ask where I could possibly go to get away from it. But I can’t. And I don’t want to either. That’s what this feels like.
I thought I would spend a summer and come to some marvelous conclusions about how to get where I thought God was leading me. And in the end, my summer was spent wondering how in the world God was going to do anything in anybody’s life at all. I’m not talking about doubt per se. It’s just sometimes other things are more important than figuring out what I’m going to do a year from now, or ten years from now. Sometimes we need to see and meet God in the present, or sit and wonder just where God went, and why he went there. If only it weren’t Nineveh, you know?
I think God has a way of doing that, sneaking off to the places we just can’t bear to go. You wake up one morning thinking, sure, God, I’ll do what you want me do to. And then you get to the harbor, and you think. I’m not actually going to have to minister to these people too? I thought I had a nice haven worked out where I could be close to God, and instead God was moving through one struggle after another. Through struggles I didn’t know I would have. But all the way, like the God he is, he keeps throwing reminders my way. Like little paper airplanes that buzz by and twirl to the ground, you want to stop and analyze them, try to figure out how they pertain to the whole life you want to live, and instead by the time you notice them they’re already lying on the ground. All you can do is keep going. You wish you could treasure these things up, waiting for some kind of fulfillment, but when you get home at night, after a long day, you just have no idea where your time went.
Am I just lazy? Is that why I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to be doing with my life? Is that why I feel like the vision I have is so far out I can never get to it? Is that why every day it feels further away?
No, that’s not exactly it. It’s like the more I want to take a plunge, step out in faith, the more I wonder where or how or when to go about it.
I suppose God has his own timing. But it’s still so hard to accept that. It’s still so hard not to feel like I’ve become simply apathetic. And that’s not what I want.
Answering is something, I think, very much like living. I’m staking something down here. I’m going to live my life as the answer to what I think is a calling. I think that’s sort of what God expects. Or maybe it’s more like living my life to the very point and beyond where I’m not just me, but somehow Christ in me.
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