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Callings

            Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (II Peter 1:10-11)

Calling. Election. Both have to do with our being selected or chosen to do, to have, or to be something. I don’t know if everyone longs to know their calling or to confirm their election, but I suspect that many do. The idea tends to send our thoughts into realms of influence, power, fame, and fortune. I mean, what possible good would it do to “call” someone to be a stocker at a grocery store or to flip burgers at a fast-food place?

This is another case of our focus being turned in the wrong direction. Our calling and election is in cultivating faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, mutual affection, and love in our lives. It’s about what we do where we are with what we have. We are all called to be witnesses, ambassadors, and children of the Most High - even if we flip burgers.

Sometimes, it seems as if I am more downwardly mobile than I am upwardly so. I went from being a library clerk to being an administrative assistant.  That was a step up, but then I lost my job and ended up as a glorified stock clerk. I moved up from that to a sales coordinator, but left that job to become a care-giver. When that was over, my next job was as a freelance gardener and seasonal help at a garden center and a craft store. That’s not exactly ending up as Pharoah’s right-hand man. But I believe those jobs are part of God’s calling because I have learned and have had the opportunity to influence people.

That doesn’t mean I’ve lived up to that calling, especially in my own opinion. But it brings me back to something I’ve been saying a lot in the past few months. We are to “do what we can, with what we have, where were are, now.” 

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