I'm 100% Sure What Your Calling Is

Wouldn’t it be nice to know with 100% certainty what God is calling you to do?

Being in my 20s, and spending most of my time around people in that formational season of life, I spend a lot of my time pondering questions like…what am I called to do? What job should I take? Who should I date or marry? What are my career goals? Is this the right time to have a kid? What do I do with my loneliness and with my restlessness?

I know that some of the readers of this will find themselves in different seasons but asking similar questions related to calling. When should I retire? Should I change my career for the remainder of my working years or just keep it? What do I do with my dissatisfaction with my life?

While I can’t pretend to answer all of those questions — nor should I as each one is a deep invitation from God to wrestle with Him, and, ultimately, to build a prayer life — but I do have a bold question.

What if I told you I’m 100% certain what your calling is?

By calling, I don’t necessarily mean your vocation, like whether God has invited you to marriage or singleness, or what to do for your 9-5.

By calling, I mean the thing that God has invited all of us towards, and that is being worked out in every season of our life, and is ultimately where we are all headed. It’s this:

I’m 100% certain that your calling (and mine) is to grow in confidence in God’s love for us.

• Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.

• Revelation 22:4 tells us that our destiny is to see God’s face and live with him forever and ever.

• Song of Songs, which is best read as an allegory of Christ and the Church, describes the end of the Bride’s journey as coming up from the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved, with her Beloved’s love irrevocably tattooed on her heart (8:5-6).

• Jesus Himself tells us that we are invited to be perfect in love as a reflection of our heavenly Father’s perfect love (Matthew 5:48).

Saints and mystics and Jesus-followers from the last two thousand years have rightly affirmed that the secret to loving our neighbor well, or, in Jesus’s words, being perfect in love, starts with a deep revelation of God’s love.

Berard of Clairvaux, a twelfth-century Cistercian monk, speaks of four degrees, or successive stages, of growing in love:

1. Love of Self for Self’s Sake (when we only love ourselves)

2. Love of God for Self’s Sake (when we learn to love God because of how it makes us feel)

3. Love of God for God’s Sake (when we learn to love God regardless of how we feel)

4. Love of Self for God’s Sake (when we learn to see ourselves as God sees us and therefore embody God’s love to the world around us)

This fourth stage, what Bernard views as the aim, goal, direction, and, indeed, calling, of every Jesus-follower is simply to be so transformed by God’s love for us that we become the very embodiment of God’s love for the world. (Time would fail me to write about how Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and more speak of the same reality but in different words…stay subscribed 🤪).

The saints and mystics are also unified in this: this growth in love is God’s doing, not our own. In other words, love for God and neighbor isn’t a switch that can be turned on and off, all we can do is position ourselves to receive the gift. It’s about position, not performance.

Hence the centrality of the practice of prayer in the life of following Jesus. Prayer is simply positioning ourselves day in and day out to receive God’s love, so that, over the course of a lifetime, we gradually grow in confidence of God’s love for us so that we become the embodiment of God’s love for the world!

So what does this mean for us today?

This means that your calling, or invitation from God today, is to grow in your confidence in love. It means a daily choice to position ourselves to receive His love — and to remove every obstacle in and around us from receiving this love. It means cultivating and tending to the reach in our hearts for Him. To continue to “direct our hearts into the love of God,” as Paul writes in 2 Thess 3:5. To “pray without ceasing” as Paul writes in 1 Thess 5:17.

This means that if you are having a great season, your calling is to position yourself to receive His love.

If you are having a hard season, your calling is to position yourself to receive His love.

If you are the leader of a business or ministry, your calling is to position yourself to receive His love.

If you are a stay-at-home parent, your calling is to position yourself to receive His love.

If you are promoted or demoted, clear about your life’s direction, or confused about where you are going, poor or rich, Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative, your invitation is the same: get loved by God. And let it transform you over the course of the remaining years of your life until you emerge from every wilderness season leaning on your Beloved with greater dependency and affection.

Pray this today:

God, would you help me position myself to receive your love today? Would you remove every obstacle in my life that keeps me from receiving the gift of your wild, crazy, reckless, incomprehensible love for me? And would you give me the grace me keep doing this for the rest of my life?

P.S. Always feel free to hit “reply” and let me know how these emails are impacting you, what you want to hear more of, what you want to hear less of, or just what God is up to in your prayer life. My friend Dillon told me I needed to change the background color to a softer color and I happily listened. Just trying to come alive and live in love with Jesus and chat with others who are desiring the same thing 😎