It's Elite — Five Lies that Keep us from Our Calling
THE FIVE LIES
There are five lies that we tuck into on a regular basis which keep us from recognising and following our calling. Let’s pick them apart and, in the process, discover how the truth is much better than we imagine.
It’s elite—Five lies that keep us from our calling
This is number two in the Five Lies That Keep Us From Our Calling series.
IT’S ELITE
Honestly, I get it. Life just seems to shine on some people.
And to us mere mortals, we can only imagine how impossibly fun it must be to be so #blessed. As we look on from the sidelines, gawping at the whirlwind of shiny white teeth and acceptance speeches, it’s easy to think that for these people following their calling was just somehow inevitable. They are the special ones that are called to greatness, destined to change the world and really do something meaningful with their lives.
But me? I’m just me.
Now, in a way, it’s totally normal and actually pretty sensible to compare ourselves to others, but if we’re not careful it can become a problem.
I know from experience that it’s all too easy to use it as an excuse for passivity: to dismiss our own gifts and to avoid pursuing our calling. In our disappointment and jealously, we come to believe that only the favoured ones get that divine purpose from the heavens which blesses them with special skills to make them popular or powerful or rich. We say: a life of purpose is not for me because I wasn’t born one of the special ones.
We can’t afford to believe this lie, and fortunately we don’t have to.
The Christian tradition of vocation comes from this understanding that we are all uniquely made. There is a voice that calls us to use our life for specific purposes. Just like the oak tree is calling out from inside the acorn, we too have particular expressions of life and love and creativity that want to unfold within our lives.
Does that sound too good to be true? Well here is the rub: There is no promise that this will be cool.
There is no promise that your calling will conform to the values of success that we hold in this world. We are not promised success, fame, power or wealth; in fact, it is often the case that following our calling will drive us away from these things—for a time, at least—because they do not fulfil the needs of the soul.
The truth is that we all have a calling, even if it’s not the one we want.
And sometimes the biggest barrier to engaging with our vocation is that we are not willing to look small enough or close enough, at the humble, familiar things that make up who we are.
There’s a wonderful old lady in my church called Doreen who likes to say ‘what do I have in my hand?’ A question taken from the story of Moses. It means, what have I been given that I might be overlooking, which God wants me to make use of?
Despite how it might sound, getting in touch with our calling is often quite a humbling process. It requires us to stop judging and truly accept what we have to offer the world, no matter how uncool it may be.
In the words of Henry Van Dyke, you must “Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
And more broadly, Martin Luther King Jr puts it this way:
“Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. Even if it does not fall in the category of one of the so-called big professions, do it well. As one college president said, ‘A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.’ If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.'”
You see we all have a calling even if it’s not the one we want. Even if it’s embarrassingly meagre to us. It doesn’t matter how humble, the application and integration of our skills, passions and opportunities will still be truly fulfilling.
So, maybe next time you realise that you are neglecting your own potential because of how it compares to others, try giving yourself a little slap on the bot-bot, and then inscribe this deep truth into your memory instead:
All greatness starts small.
Godspeed,
T Mo