(The Nationalist, 11 February 2005)
The Bible has a story about God calling Abram: ‘Leave your country, your family and your father’s house for the land that I will show you’. It doesn’t say anything about God giving him a map or compass. God said, ‘I will show you’. He didn’t say, ‘It will be easy’, but, ‘I will bless you’. ‘So Abram went as the Lord told him’. Abandon everything; let go of all and venture into the unknown; that’s a scary challenge.
God’s calls are many, and people respond in many ways. Commonly they are uncertain: Will God ask too much? Will I be able to do it? (because it often seems too much). God calls us to greatness, and doesn’t believe in letting sleeping dogs lie.
The longest journey for most of us is the journey within, for instance, from the head to the heart, or vice versa. We are afraid of it, because we are afraid of ourselves, afraid of what we might find, and afraid to trust ourselves.
We are afraid also of each other, even of those we are intimate with: ‘What will they think of me, if they learn what I’m really like?’
God calls us to be true to ourselves. A rabbi, Josiah, said: ‘At the end of my life, God will not ask me, “Josiah, Why were you not like Moses?” But he will ask me, “Why were you not Josiah?”’ It’s OK to be yourself; that’s why God made you that way. There are over 6,000 million people on earth, and God did not make even two of them the same. Isn’t there a message in that?
Every call from God to the human person is a call to be and to become, to do and to grow. God’s call to every person on the face of the earth is to become a human being, to be true to oneself, to have life and have it more abundantly. (John 10.10) ‘The person fully alive is the glory of God’.
The basic Christian call is to recognize that we are children of God, loved by God unconditionally. Our call is to grow to be adult sons or daughters of God, according to the example of Jesus Christ.
The world is divided into those who are, and those who are not, open to change. There are those who resist change because they are afraid, and there are those who are open to it, because, even though they also are afraid, they have courage and hope. Fear is a greater impediment to growth than laziness, or stupidity, or selfishness. ‘Fear not’ is the most widely-used of God’s words in the Bible – more than 80 times.
God is calling us now. To what? To move beyond the safety of where we are, the security of how we think, and the familiarity of what we do, to become all that we can become.