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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Give The World Your Best
Isaiah 9:1-4; Matthew 4:12-23
Frederick Buechner wrote a whimsical theological alphabet back in the 1970s. A sort of sanctified Devil's Dictionary (Ambrose Bierce's 1911 skeptical take on American mores), Wishful Thinking begins with Abraham and ends with Zaccheus. Stop off at V and you find Vocation, the high class word for one's career, or calling.
What Buechner has to say there ties in just right with our Gospel story for last Sunday -- Where Jesus called four fishermen to drop their nets, tie up their boats, sell their business, and become "fishers for people" instead. I love Christ's generous kindness in the way he called them to discipleship. He spoke of spiritual things in the most practical understandable words, inviting these guys to do God's work as if it was the job they knew inside out and were especially good at doing.
And that's exactly the way he calls you and me today. If we're willing to listen in the first place.
I'll let Brother Freddy B. take it from here...
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.
By and large, a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deoderant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
10:31 AM
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