It is only as we...
Illustration
It is only as we grow older in the faith that the truth of Jesus' words are actually realized -- "you have chosen me but I have chosen you."
Young preachers are aware of this as I was on that night so long ago when returning home from work, I felt the compulsion that I must become a preacher.
However, the danger of singling out such moments, perhaps magnifying them in the hindsight, is that we forget that the Christian life is the daily discovery that Christ is choosing us, calling us to do something. I now look back and realize how it was the trivia of life that they were to turn out to be the great decisions. I chose to study German rather than Latin because I could buy a second-hand German grammar and could not afford a new Latin grammar. Yet at that watershed, my whole life forever afterwards was changed. A letter is forgotten to be mailed; a chance meeting with friends; the illness against which we so violently protested as being unfair; the closing of one door that would lead to what we wanted, and the opening of another, so unexpected, which in our youthful ignorance we opened under protest; but now looking back, we can see the truth -- it was Christ who closed the one door and opened the other.
The old theologians used to call it "The Holy Calling." It is holy because he who chooses is Holy; but the call may be to what might seem a secular and far from religious, destiny.
-- Docherty
Young preachers are aware of this as I was on that night so long ago when returning home from work, I felt the compulsion that I must become a preacher.
However, the danger of singling out such moments, perhaps magnifying them in the hindsight, is that we forget that the Christian life is the daily discovery that Christ is choosing us, calling us to do something. I now look back and realize how it was the trivia of life that they were to turn out to be the great decisions. I chose to study German rather than Latin because I could buy a second-hand German grammar and could not afford a new Latin grammar. Yet at that watershed, my whole life forever afterwards was changed. A letter is forgotten to be mailed; a chance meeting with friends; the illness against which we so violently protested as being unfair; the closing of one door that would lead to what we wanted, and the opening of another, so unexpected, which in our youthful ignorance we opened under protest; but now looking back, we can see the truth -- it was Christ who closed the one door and opened the other.
The old theologians used to call it "The Holy Calling." It is holy because he who chooses is Holy; but the call may be to what might seem a secular and far from religious, destiny.
-- Docherty
