Most of us live with a certain fear about God's potential calling on our lives. It seems like the persons of faith held up in the highest regard are the ones who gave up everything to follow Him to some distant land where they felt lost, didn't know the language, feared the people, faced persecution. Every time we are introduced the idea of God's calling on our life, we seem to somehow get the idea that God's calling will always take us away from home.
He'll ask us to move somewhere. He'll ask us to leave our current connections and relationships. He'll ask us to leave a job we love. He'll take all the things that make us satisfied and content and unafraid in the world, and He'll shake them until all we have left is Him...until we don't even know where we are any more, but we're strangers here.
And we're not sure we're up to the task.
Most of us don't relish the idea of leaving our lives. Most of us tremble (at least) at the thought of moving to some foreign land. Most of us worry that God will ask something of us that will make us miserable forever. (By the way, overwhelmingly, the foreign missionaries I've actually talked to are very happy with their lives; they are built for the kind of mission God called them to, and they love it.) Most of us are scared to death that God will have any calling at all on our life.
But we don't need to be.
See, the truth is that God has the same calling on all of our lives. And no, that doesn't mean what you think it means. That doesn't mean He's calling all of us to the very thing we're afraid of most. That doesn't mean that if we're not on the foreign mission field, we're missing it completely. That doesn't mean that God is moving us all around like pieces on a chess board, putting us here or there or somewhere or nowhere for a season at His own whim.
The calling that God has on our lives is not a calling of mission. No matter what all the church camps and retreats you've been to (or your deepest fears) might suggest.
The calling that God has on our lives is a calling of being.
Specifically, God has called us - you, me, all of us - to be His. (Isaiah 54:6)
That's it. He calls us to be His.
He calls us to be persons who belong to Him. Persons who are formed in His image. Persons who reflect His glory. Persons whose lives are clothed in His love, His grace, His mercy, His compassion, His goodness. Persons who love and are loved by Him. Persons who can't imagine a single day outside of His presence. Persons who seek Him. Persons eternally connected to Him by the very sacred breath that flows through our very being.
What we do with that, where we go, how our lives play out in the details, what church we belong to, what version of the Bible we read, what community has our heart...none of that matters. None of that is the point. The greatest - no, the only - calling on our lives is that we are His. Period.
And you can do that from anywhere.
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