From Brueggemann’s Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile:
“[Call is] a sense that one’s life has a theonomous cast, is deeply referred to the purposes of God, which gives freedom and istance and perspective in relation to all other concerns. Such a call is not an event, but an ongoing dynamic of a growing and powerful claim. One’s embrance of a sense of all may mature in time and grow beyond the innocence of the outset… call concerns the yielding up of our safe world.”
Perhaps more than any other, I love this as a description of the Christian life, a growing and powerful claim moving beyond the innocence of its outset. When I first became a follower of the way of Christ, I was young. 9. The innocence of the onset of my calling: I understood good and bad, things that made God happy, and things that made God sad. Sin and separation, heaven and hell. I understood obedience, in the most rudimentary of senses, and so I was immersed… and my walk began. And his claim on me grows, and becomes ever more powerful… or rather, my understanding of it… as I try and fail to offer myself to him, to yield up my safe world. With the growth comes assurance of his faithfulness, and an increasing understanding of how often and throughly I fail. It has been 16 years now that I have served him, that I have known and striven after (if waveringly) the one I call Lord. I have fallen. I have not been faithful. I have failed. I have been broken before him, so many times, angry and ranting until he teaches me– again– his comfort. And so it is. He has remained faithful even when I have been faithless… he has forgiven, and forgives. And as he shows me his faithfulness, I learn a little bit more about being faithful… with his forgiveness, a little bit more about how to forgive… a little bit more about what it means, really means, to love. And sometimes I forget, turning back after the safety of the known and the comfort of the familiar things of this world. He waits… offering me the opportunity to trade the comforts I can see for the assurance of the unknown, of that which I cannot yet know. So again I approach the alter and am given enough grace to make the sacrifice… and again the call deepens, its hold over me becoming more powerful. The innocence of the outset has given way to something else. As he changes me, I am able to yield a little more to the Changing and loosen my hold on the safe and familiar. And therein lies the irony of faith…. in the letting go comes the one who is more familiar with me than I am with myself. And even knowing that, I struggle to let go… to yield my will, my dreams, my desires to whatever-it-is that he wills for me. But he’s calling, so I’ll take one more step.
