My dad was, in his own words, “just a country doctor with a sniff and sneeze practice.” It was his way of downplaying the extraordinary effort that it had taken him to work his way through medical school during the Depression because he wanted to help people. I also knew that he felt called to offer the fruits of his education in a town with no hospital — until my mother insisted that we move closer to the hub of his work.
At church however, the notion of call seemed to be reserved for those who entered formal ministry. It wasn’t until someone handed me a copy of Elizabeth O’Connor’s book, Call to Commitment, that I began to look at biblical stories of call and noticed that call came to all sorts of people: shepherds and kings, midwives and mothers, tax collectors and, in the gospel for this week, fishermen drying their nets after a hard day’s work.*
The trouble with many biblical stories of call is that they seem so clear and detailed: a burning bush, a still small voice, Jesus standing on the shore, Saul/Paul being blinded and knocked off his horse. My own experience is less precise, more situational. But if we look, we see other instances of call in scripture: Martha confronting Jesus over letting Lazarus die; Lydia being left with a house-church to lead after Paul stirred up local leaders against his teaching; Zacchaeus promising not to cheat tax-payers any more. Those are examples of call too.
God’s call does not seem limited to a specific type of work. Instead, something stirs a specific person in specific circumstances, always with the larger purpose of enriching the web of life on this planet. While Jesus focused on healing and wholeness among human beings, God’s larger creation story includes the birds of the air and fish of the sea, mountains that dance and stars that sing.
Now that I am seeing my life in this larger symphony of creation, it makes room for inner and outer calls to simplify, conserve, and care for the watershed where I live as well as the neighbors who share its gift of life. May this be a season of refreshing your call too.
–Marjory Zoet Bankson, Editor of InwardOutward.org
