meditatio at the water's edge

I've been thinking a little about vocation or calling. I was thinking through what Todd Hunter said about our only vocation being apprenticeship to Jesus. I think that is so helpful because so many people get so hung up on whether or not they are following God's 'plan for their life'. We start talking like, "Well, I missed God's plan A, now I will have to deal with plan B or plan C"...and so on.

We get so anxious about whether we are engaged in the right career or whether we married the right person or whether we should have moved to California or not, that we miss the point. Our vocation is to live as apprentices to Jesus. Every other engagement is an opportunity to show what that life of apprenticeship looks like when applied to whatever situation in which we find ourselves.

Often, I think our anxiety in making life decisions is misidentified. We beat ourselves up wondering if some decision is God's will or not...if it is one's 'calling' to do some thing. If we were honest, I think our anxiety is really about making commitments of any kind. We are afraid of being removed of certain options...certain freedoms...certain preferences. However, if we see our vocation as apprenticeship, and if we see that our real fear is a fear of committing to the wrong thing, then we can begin to make some progress.

Stanley Hauerwas said in an interview that "You always marry the wrong person." Then he said that the inverse is true also: "You always marry the right person." I think the point was that it is a matter of commitment. I think most of life is like that, and we can make real progress in our mental health (not to mention our spiritual development) if we start paying attention to that fact. If my primary concern is "what does it look like for me to live as Jesus' apprentice?" then I will simply apply that to my decisions as they come along. It changes the question of "did I marry the right person?" into "now that we're married, how should our lives look together as we live in God's story?" That is a very different question.

Now, of course, I believe that God does direct us in particular circumstances. It has been God's practice in the past (Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Peter, Paul, and of course, Jesus). But I believe that if we are walking as Jesus' apprentices in the kingdom of God, with our souls being transformed into the likeness of our Creator, then we will be much less anxious about 'screwing up God's plan for our lives'. Dallas Willard says that God wants to bring us to a point where we can do what we want. God wants our will to be transformed so that it becomes the same as his--and thus, we can do whatever we want.

So I don't think we should be so anxious about whether we should take one job or another (unless of course there are ethical questions) or whether we should buy this house or that house. Those decisions we can be expected to make in light of our vocation as the people of God. So the question then shifts from "How can I know if this is in God's plan for my life?" to "What course of action would be in accordance with life in the kingdom of God?" Do you see the difference? The second question is answerable.

Your vocation, and mine, is to live in the kingdom of God as Jesus' apprentices in whatever life situation we find ourselves. Our life decisions are made, not in terror of screwing things up, but with confidence in Jesus, who is the Path.