Loss

This summer I read a book by Gene Edward Veith titled God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life. It was immensely helpful as I thought about career questions and hunted for a job, and I commend it to anyone who’s thinking about what to do for a living, or how to do it.

Veith uses the words vocation and calling interchangeably (for reasons Latin students may recognize), both to refer to whatever it is God gave you to do as a worker, a student, a daughter, a son, a citizen, and so forth. In each of these roles you have a calling.

But recently I’ve been thinking about something Veith points out in his final chapter: vocations—callings—change. John Piper says the same thing in one of his books:

Step back and…plan the various forms of your life’s ministry in chapters. Chapters are divided by various things—age, strength, singleness, marriage, employment, children at home, children in college, grandchildren, retirement, etc. No chapter has all the joys. Finite life is a series of tradeoffs. Finding God’s will, and living for the glory of Christ to the full in every chapter is what makes it a success, not whether it reads like somebody else’s chapter or whether it has in it what only another chapter will bring. (from Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, edited by John Piper & Wayne Grudem [Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1991], pp. 56-57)

Callings change. I am no longer called to several activities that until recently I threw my whole self into: study full time, work for a college, be a member of Grace Community Church. Some aspects of that life I miss; some I am glad to leave behind. In a few respects, I find the loss very difficult.

So I’ve been pondering this passage Veith quotes from the Puritan John Cotton:

The last work which faith puts forth about a man’s calling is this: faith with boldness resigns up his calling into the hands of God or man; whenever God calls a man to lay down his calling when his work is finished, herein the sons of God far exceed the sons of men. Another man when his calling comes to be removed from him, he is much ashamed and much afraid; but if a Christian man is to forego his calling, he lays it down with comfort and boldness in the sight of God. (p. 163)

In this new chapter I am called—summoned—to lay down some things and take up others. “With comfort and boldness in the sight of God.”

A loss may be temporary and nonetheless painful, I am rediscovering. So I was comforted this Sunday when my pastor read 1 Corinthians 7:24: “So, brothers, in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.”

It is God who does the calling. And after all, to answer a call is to come closer.