Calling ahead for reservations
Attention all women! (Or men, too. You can tell me what you think but be prepared for me to slam you mercilessly in my next blog if you say anything offensive.) I’m taking a survery. Tell me what you think.
Today I was talking with some of the other female interns and we got on the subject of what our “callings” are. This is a big deal to most of us. I think to me it is a little bit less vital, perhaps. Lately I’ve realised that I could be happy any number of places doing any number of things as far as a career, and I’m not afraid of working at a coffee shop or somewhere else part time and doing ministry part time. I don’t believe there is one perfect job or career which I must find to fulfill God’s plan for my life; I don’t demand a perfect, prestigious job making astoundingly visible impacts on peoples’ lives; I’m a bit more, shall we say, post-modern about things than that. I am comfortable now being in the world, though perhaps not of the world. I am not afraid to be in it; in fact I believe it is the best place to be, and perhaps that is the real reason I wound up at UC after all; to learn that. But to most of my fellow interns, a calling is of utmost importance. And one of the girls said quite frankly that she went to college to get her MRS degree. She didn’t feel a need to figure out what her “calling” was, or what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go, because, of course, her husband would have a call and she would just help him out. (This they call “submission.”) Now she is going to start her senior year in the fall and meeting her husband at college just doesn’t seem to be in the cards. So she’s a little depressed because she has no idea what her passion is or how she wants to serve God.
This is so sad to me. How is it that we as women have no more sense of purpose than to live for a husband? We are valuable and useful just as we are, fully able through God’s power to do good works which he has prepared for us to do. I want to live for God first, and if a husband comes along that will be great. But I so want to be a whole person, with skills and talents and dreams and ideas and a purpose, serving God whole-heartedly! I know that unless I can do that first, unless God and I are ok with it being just us, and I have a sense of who I am just in Christ, I’ll never be ready to get married. Maybe that’s one reason I came here; to see who I am when I’m all by myself, when it’s just me and God, when my family isn’t within a forty-minute car ride if I call and am lonely or sick. I miss them so much, and my friends, too. But I’m learning that God is my family. God is my greatest friend. First and foremost God is my everything, and then he’ll bring people into my life, when he judges the time and place to be right.
Responses? Objections? What do you think? Am I way off here?
-Mel
