Called to Love and Serve

By: Roberta Cook
      On the subject of vocational call, Frederick Buechner, author of Wishful Thinking, suggests that “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
      But where this deep gladness and deep hunger meet are intersection points which form along a spiraling walk of life.

      For me, this call has never been clear, and my passions seem to lead me into just as many muddy waters, dead ends, and even heart-breaks as they seem to inspire potential excursions into green pastures and still waters.
      And so I attended the October 21^st seminar “Called to Serve, But Not in the Parish” with a hungry heart. I came deeply seeking a guiding connection, an interrupting beat, or unexpected voice which might reveal to me important next steps. 

      Esteemed leaders gathered from rich traditions of ministry to help us glean insights into how we excavate the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, describing gifts and talents and where they serve, sharing information about professional development, and revealing the connective beats and figures who carried them along the way. All of this was shared through panel conversations with a group of students so that we might begin to more fully realize our call and cull resources and tools for the journey.  
      Revelations of personal forages with bigotry and ignorance, encounters with grief and dying, emergency room conflicts with religious tradition and medical practice, such anecdotes grabbed hold of me and kept a grip. These illustrations of faith, witness and discipleship in prisons, colleges, hospitals and even video studios began to illuminate how God’s light breaks into our consciousness and forces us forward less as who we were and more as his creatures. 
      I found myself instinctively moving away from logically built sequences, or even passionate response. Call is birthed in silence and we form in community.  
      Bits of conversation seemed to pave a way into a fuller sojourn. I remember a cacophony of voices arise from throughout the day, saying things like:
      “You have skills. Bring to the table what you have so others can bring their gifts.” “They don’t know me, but they’re willing to gird me in prayer.” “You enter folks’ lives when they are looking for God’s face”, “…loving people as they deserve to be loved…” “[We] help them be real with what they feel.” 
      “Listen to the invitation” (Though sometimes you must “kick the door open.”) 
People lost and treasured entered my mind. Faces met me and I conjured points of reconnection. I think about how lost loves, mentors and unexpected teachers formed me in encounter and made me new. 
      I reflected on coming home the night before to a dark yet pregnant apartment,  feeling the disparate puzzle pieces flailing before me. 
      Questions in the room were raised. “How do we eradicate Empire from our hearts?” How do you find happiness?” “How do we face for which we are not equipped?”

      I heard what I forgot I knew, and was strengthened in awakened knowledge of my fuller wisdom, born in stories of my parents and challenges on different paths. 

“[Be] free to deal with enemies in a different way.” “Raise the right questions when you must.”  

      We were reminded to live in strong community and to keep vivid transparency at play so that those checks and balances can reveal us to one another. Because only in community can we “be free to accomplish God’s will”. 
      I found myself approaching Delois Brown Daniels, Vice President of Mission and Spiritual Care. I shared with Delois that both my parents were in healthcare and I was painfully aware of my limitations and of what life and death situations lie at the heart of service. Delois warmly held my hands, received my question and reflected back that my willingness, in the words of another panelist, “to go there with yourself” will bring others to me, and will lead me forward.  
      Threads of conversation were woven together and I found myself feeling as if my story is connected into the lives of these students and professionals around me. 
      I am deeply glad at heart and I turn to Proverbs 4:23 which reminds us, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”