Three Callings for Your Life and for Our Time | The On Being Project

Consider these words about our calling: You are called to pray at all times (1 Thess. 5:17), work with your hands, and live a simple life (4:11). If you will not work, you shall not eat (2 Thess. 3:10). You are all called as priests unto our God (1 Pet. 2:9). You all have been given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–19). For those who are

Second, this definition surveys the expanse of vocation, which includes three sacred territories: identity, purpose, and direction.

Consider the possibility that God’s call on his people isn’t always an immediate promotion to a different position but a faithful pursuit of a different life. Perhaps “calling” is less about doing and more about the person you’re becoming while you’re “doing.”

the summons to live our journey is a vocatus, a calling forth, quite separate from one's conscious desires?

God enters our lives as a call from the future. It is as if we hear Him beckoning to us from the far horizon of time, urging us to take a journey and undertake a task that, in ways we cannot fully understand, we were created for. That is the meaning of the word vocation, literally “a calling,” a mission, a task to which we are summoned.

Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled Hopeful Imagination, suggests that “a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,” and notes that “the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,’ one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.”