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When You Grow Up
by
Sergeant Aaron White
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
This is the question asked of children in households around
the world. It used to be a fairly straightforward question,
almost a ridiculous one:
“What do I want to be when I grow up? What do you mean? My
Dad’s a farmer / baker / lawyer / King. That’s what I’m going
to be as well, as if I have a choice. Duh.”
Or,
“What do I want to be when I grow up? Well, I guess the
choices are wife or nun. Like my Mom.”
But now the options are wide open, or at least it seems that
way. You don’t have to follow in the footsteps of your parents
if you don’t want to (though of course we want to reserve the
right to come and live on their couch and eat their food if
our exciting careers in underwater basket weaving don’t work
out.)
Of course, this glut of options does not necessarily make
things easier. It actually forces us to ask some fairly
difficult questions. What do I want to do? How will I make a
living doing it? And perhaps most difficult of all: Does God
have a job in mind for me?
This last question sometimes sounds like this: Does God have a
calling for me? A calling used to mean that someone was
going to be a priest or minister or missionary of some kind,
suggesting that only these special people were uniquely called
by God into ministry jobs. But again, things have opened up a
bit in this regard. It is now widely recognised that God might
call someone to serve Him as an actor, a musician, a
carpenter, a teacher, or a clown every bit as much as He might
call someone to be a monk. Full-time ministry no longer
automatically means putting on a white collar, attaching red
epaulets to your shoulders, or submitting to a vow of celibacy
for life.
So, if God does have a calling for everybody, how do you find
out what yours is? I guess you could always wait for a divine
bolt of lightning to tell you that God has a life of plumbing
in store for you. It has happened before (not so much the
plumbing bit, but the bolt of lightning bit). The story of
Saul / Paul in the Bible is one where Saul is blinded, spoken
to directly by Jesus, given a name change, and later set apart
specifically by the Holy Spirit to go out as a missionary. It
seems kind of unfair that Paul was given so much direction in
his calling. Then again, the life set out for him was not an
easy one, so we probably shouldn’t complain.
Still, the cases of people deciding their future based on God
making them blind are decidedly rare, so we should perhaps
look for some other guiding principles.
I like to look at some of the disciples for inspiration. Here
they are, happily fishing away, doing their jobs, and then
along comes Jesus. “Come, follow me,” he says. And they stop
what they are doing and follow him, as if this was the kind of
thing that happened every day.
It turns out their decision was not taken just on a whim. Many
Jewish boys at that time would be marked out specially to
receive religious instruction from Rabbis in small groupings.
The fact that the disciples were out fishing means that they
had probably been rejected by the Rabbis as “not suitable for
instruction.” So, instead of delving into the mysteries of
God, they got to spend their time delving into the smelly
insides of fish.
It is interesting, then, that Jesus comes along and takes the
only people who are available to him, the rejects, the
unsuitables. And they come, hungry for the Kingdom of God.
Later on they confess that they left absolutely everything for
Jesus.
But the Bible also tells us that they kept on fishing as well.
Sure, Jesus was making them into fishers of men, but they
could also keep on fishing for fish. They were good at it,
they could make a living doing it, so why not? Of course, if
Jesus came along and asked them to follow him to Jerusalem, or
if he had some specific mission stuff for them to do, they
would drop everything and do it. And Jesus used their fishing
time to teach them lessons about himself and his Kingdom.
Their jobs as fishermen definitely came second to Jesus, but
it didn’t mean they had to stop fishing.
Paul was actually the same way. His main job was to follow
Jesus and to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. But he also
made tents wherever he went and sold them. Presumably he was
pretty good at making tents, and maybe he even enjoyed it. (I
can’t imagine enjoying making tents, but then I suppose that
is not part of my calling.)
The point is, God has given us all natural abilities, and it
is good and proper to use them. We can be athletes or
scientists or writers or fishermen, and those jobs may well be
part of God’s calling for us. But God’s primary calling for us
is to follow him, no matter where we are or what we are doing.
That way, everything we do, whether we eat, or drink, or work
as a cashier at the Safeway, we can do it all for the glory of
God.
This kind of thinking puts our “vocations” in the proper
perspective. It means we have to hold on to them lightly,
ready to drop them at a moment’s notice to follow hard after
Jesus. Our jobs and careers – really our whole lives – are
entirely secondary to the Kingdom of God, and to put them in
first place is essentially idolatry. But it also means that
our jobs and careers are incredibly important. It means that
whatever we find ourselves doing right now, we should do it
with care and excellence, because we are doing it for the
glory of God. And as we plan out our future vocations, this
must be done with diligence and effort, as we want everything
we do to best reflect the goodness of God.
Compared to Jesus, our vocations are utterly insignificant.
But because of Jesus, our vocations take on the eternal
significance of worshipping God.
So what do I want to be when I grow up? An astronaut. Or a
cowboy. Maybe an astronaut cowboy. An astronaut cowboy fireman
who follows Jesus.
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