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Where You Never Expected to Be
When I was a boy and did something that I shouldn’t have done, something that displeased my parents very much, my mother would often use a phrase that I suppose other parents have used as well. She would look me in the eye and say, “Son, that was uncalled for!”

It’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? “Uncalled for.” As if there’s someone out there calling for you. As if what it means to be good is not something that wells up automatically inside of you but is something that has to be summoned and called for from the outside, as if being the person you ought to be needs to be called for from the outside.

The older I get, the more I know that’s true, that one of the deepest human hungers that we have is to be called for. And one of the deepest human fears that we have is that there is no one out there who cares enough about us to call for us.

The well known scientist, Carl Sagen, late in his life became interested in what was called the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” Another way to put that is the search for other beings out there in the universe who might be communicating with us. Radio telescopes were set up and they listened to radio waves throughout the universe to see if someone was trying to communicate with Earth. Someone said to Carl Sagen, “What if we never get any messages?”

“It’s a possibility,” he said, “but it’s a depressing thought to me that there might be no one in the universe trying to call us.”

Those of us in the Christian faith know that there is some being in the universe calling us, that God does not stand aloof from us and is not indifferent to us but communicates with us, summons us that we’re called for.

There’s a wonderful story in the New Testament. It’s in the Gospel of Mark about two brothers, Peter and Andrew. There were fishermen and one day they were casting their nets and Jesus walked by on the shoreline. He saw them out there in the boat and he called them. “Follow me,” he said, “and I’ll make you fish for people.” And immediately they got out of the boat and they followed him, no questions asked. He didn’t say, “I’ll give you a bigger salary.” He didn’t say, “I’ll make you famous.” He simple said, “Follow me.”

Then he went down the shoreline a little bit more and he saw two other brothers, James and John. They were in their boat mending their nets, and he said to them the same thing: Follow me. And immediately, no questions asked, they got out of the boat and followed him. So powerful in Jesus was this call of God, so hungry they were for someone to call for them that they stepped out of the boat and they followed.

Now sometimes when religious people use the word “calling” it gets misunderstood. Sometimes we think, well, only ministers, only priests, only professional clergy get called. Pastors have a call but everybody else just has a job. Well, that’s not true. We believe that God calls everyone. And maybe you have experienced that call. But if not, if you knew how to listen you could hear God calling you right now.

But how would you know if you’re being called? How would you know how to hear it? How would you know how to recognize that God is calling you? Well, sometimes this call touches down deep inside of us in those secret places in our lives that give us the most joy. If you were honest with yourself, there’s some place in your life that gives you the greatest joy. Maybe it’s that you like music or you like to sing or you like to play an instrument. Maybe you like to talk with other people. Maybe you like to work with children. Maybe you like to teach. Sometimes the call of God works as the spirit stirs up our joy and passion in that secret place in our lives.

The Christian writer, Barbara Brown Taylor, tells in one of her books about a time in her life when she was struggling mightily with sense of call. She simply could not figure out what it was that God wanted her to do and be. Did God want her to be a writer? Did God want her to be a priest? Did God want her to be a social worker? Did God want her to teach? She simply didn’t know. And in her frustration and exasperation, one midnight, she says, she fell down on her knees in prayer and said: “Okay, God. You need to level with me. What do you want me to be? What do you want me to do? What are you calling me to do?” She said she felt a very powerful response, God saying, “Do what pleases you. Belong to me, but do what pleases you.” She said it struck her as very strange that God’s call could actually touch that place of her greatest joy, that she could be called to do the thing that pleases her the most.

Another Christian writer, Frederick Buechner says, “Our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” Think about that. “Our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” But there are other times when God’s call does not come so much from a place inside of us but comes from a place outside of us. Sometimes we’re being called to places we never dreamed we’d go, to do things we never dreamed we’d do, to say things we never dreamed we’d say.

Several years ago they buried a woman named Grace Thomas at the First Baptist Church cemetery in Decatur, Georgia. You probably never heard of Grace Thomas. No reason that you should. She was the child of a streetcar conductor from Birmingham, Alabama. She fell in love with a boy from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and she moved to Atlanta and married him, full-time wife. To support the family she took a job as a secretary at the state capitol in Atlanta. She was now full-time wife and full-time secretary.

Through her job she became very interested in politics and the law, so she enrolled at night law school. Now she was a full-time wife, a full-time secretary and a full-time law student. When she finally graduated from law school, she astonished her family by saying, “I’m not going to practice law. I’ve decided to run for political office.”

They said, “Mother, what office?”

Expecting her to say school board or library board, she said, “I’m going to run for the governor of Georgia. The highest office in the state.” Now this was 1954 and Grace Thomas ran for governor of Georgia. There were nine candidates that year: eight men and Grace Thomas.

There were nine candidates but there was only one issue. It was 1954 and Brown versus the Board of Education had come forth from the Supreme Court to integrate the public schools. And eight of those candidates for governor said that they thought Georgians ought to resist this every fiber in their being. Only one candidate, Grace Thomas, said that she thought it was the coming of justice. Her campaign slogan was “Say Grace at the polls.” Not many people did. She ran dead last and her family was relieved that she had gotten this out of her system. But she hadn’t.

In 1962 she ran for the governor of Georgia again. This time the civil rights movement was in full flower and the stakes were high. She went around the state with her message of progress and prosperity and racial harmony. She received death threats on her life and her family feared for her and traveled with her to protect her.

One day, she went to give a campaign speech in the little town of Louisville, Georgia. The centerpiece in Louisville is not a Civil War monument or a county courthouse, it’s an old slave market where human beings were bought and sold. She decided to give her speech under the canopy of that slave market. She addressed a gaggle of farmers and merchants and she pointed at the slave market and said, “This, thank God, has passed and the new has come. It’s time for Georgians to join hands, all races together.”

Somebody in the crowd shouted at her, “Are you a communist?”

“No!” she said.

“Well, where did you get those goldarned ideas?”

She thought about it for a minute. And then she pointed at the steeple of the First Baptist Church and she said, “I got ‘em over there in Sunday school!” Some Sunday school teacher had called Grace Thomas and now she was saying things she never dreamed she’d be saying and she was called into places she never dreamed she’d be called.

Jesus is walking along your shoreline today and calling you. And none of us is uncalled for.

 

Conversation with Thomas Long

Daniel Pawlus: Tom, thank you so much for sharing your message.

Thomas Long: My pleasure.

Pawlus: I’m so glad you’re here to talk about calling and you mentioned that we’re all called in different ways. But as a professor of theology, I’m curious, what are you hearing from your students as far as themes of why they’re being called to the seminary?

Long: Yes. We’re experiencing some changes in our student body these days. Our student body in seminaries are getting younger. They’re getting brighter in many ways. But in some ways they’re coming with a kind of general—this is not everybody of course, but as a trend—and somewhat diffused sense of call. They know they are called to do something important for God but they don’t have it quite focused yet on exactly what it’s going to be. And so we’re having to change our approach in seminary. Instead of simply educating students, we have to help them clarify their calls and in some ways present them with a call into ministry.

Lydia Talbot: I must ask you, Tom. I resonated with your mother, Belle, saying, “Tom , that was uncalled for!” My mother said the same thing. Did you ever realize, though, in Sunday school or as that little boy at that time that your calling would lead you in the direction that you went? And it would be wrong to say distinguished career because career is different from calling, but your distinguished calling.

Long: No. I had no idea as a child or an adolescent that I would end up as a Presbyterian minister or teaching in a seminary. In fact, I was pre-med all the way through college and was intending to become a physician. It was in college that I felt this inner stirring that I talked about just a few minutes ago, but some terror, too. I was a terrible public speaker with stage fright, the whole business. And the thought of having to go into work in which I would have to get up and speak was terrifying to me. So I had both this call on the outside to a place I didn’t expect to go and some joy on the inside of serving God in a new and fresh kind of way.

Talbot: It’s hard to believe!

Pawlus: You’ve absolutely come along way, Tom!

Talbot: But during seminary years you were on the radio.

Long: That’s right.

Talbot: That helped?

Long: That helped. But what helped most of all was I served as a student government officer when I was a senior in college. It put me in a position of making a lot of speeches. By this time I knew I was called into ministry. I was going to seminary. So I used that time to force myself into public speaking situations where I would gain some confidence. And then I worked on the radio when I was in seminary and that helped even more.

Pawlus: I want to pick up on this idea of fear a little bit because I’m wondering if you think we are afraid to hear our call sometimes, that God may be speaking to us but we’re not taking enough time in our busy, crazy lives and we’re not really taking in that message that he’s sending to us.

Long: Well, I think that’s right because we’ve already heard in one of the segments earlier how life can fragment and you find yourself split in all kinds of directions, satisfied by none of it. One of the things that God is calling us to is to give us a new focus which is really a summons to integrate and that can be a terrifying personal challenge, to find a new way of understanding myself as focused and aimed in a particular kind of direction. No wonder Jeremiah said, “Woe is me,” when he was called! It put him into a place and a posture and an identity that was a new and frightening thing for him.

Talbot: And isn’t that what authentic discipleship is all about? I mean, Bonhoeffer and costly grace. The treasure hidden in the field. Grace because it calls us to follow, costly because it calls us to follow Christ.

Long: Right. That is absolutely right. The call to discipleship, the call to serve God is always costly. I think, however, it is possible to distort that in a way so that we begin to think that God must be calling us to something that is utterly distasteful, that is utterly outside our range of capabilities. I think it’s important in that Biblical story I was talking about to recognize they were fishermen. That’s what their passion was. And Jesus says, “I’m calling you to fish, but in a new way.” So he utilized the gifts that they had, the passions that they had, but refocused them. And, of course, it put them into some dangerous and difficult, and challenging situations.

Pawlus: I was going to say this changes and evolves as our lives move on, doesn’t it? Our call can be one thing at one point in our life and change to something else.

Long: That’s right. In fact, I think one of the mistakes we make is to marry the notion of calling to the notion of job. We sometimes call our job our vocation. But as a matter of fact, calling is a much more dynamic concept. We might be called to speak this way in this moment, to serve that way in another moment and we’re always to have our antenna up. What are we being summoned at this moment to do and to be?

Talbot: And that wonderful Frederick Buechner quote.

Long: Deepest gladness with the world’s hunger.

Talbot: Hunger. Talk about that a little bit more.

Long: I think the important thing about that equation is that those two concepts have to be held together and in tension. Our deepest gladness is one thing, the world’s hunger is another. So I’m always looking at the joyful places in my life in relationship to what the world needs. It’s not a narcissistic or self-serving thing at that point. It gets focused and energized by needs that are outside of me and around me.

Talbot: Our calling to care about the least of these, the poor, the injustice in our society.

Long: I heard recently about a person who was absolutely opposed to his church spending any money on a free medical clinic in his town. He was in a border town in Texas and a lot of undocumented folks were coming over. He said, “You know, we’re just being asked to support a clinic that supports illegal immigration.” And so he decided that he needed to go investigate the clinic. He went over there and it just so happened that a little boy who was getting a shot came out after getting the shot, rubbing his arm, tears coming down his cheeks. His mother had gone to the restroom, so he looked around for a friendly face, he went over, climbed up in the lap of this guy and put his head on his shoulder. When that little boy did that, suddenly this man felt called to this kind of service in the world. Now he champions health care for all people regardless. But a remarkable transformation.

Talbot: It changed his life.

Long: It absolutely did.

Talbot: Thank you, Tom Long.
     

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