More About the Call

"If you build it, he will come"

The Voice to Ray Kinsella, Field of Dreams, 1989

This movie is still somewhat of a mystery to me, even though I've watched it at least a score of times.  It never gets old, and never fails to get to me.  Though not anything even resembling a Christian movie, I think it's a perfect illustration of the Call of God on our lives.  Think about it:  a mysterious voice whispers to an Iowa corn farmer and gives him a vision of a baseball field.  He and his family risk everything to build that ballpark where the spirits of dead baseball players can come to once again play the game they all loved so much.  Ray Kinsella puts it all on the line to follow the call, bringing restoration to a disgraced baseball team, hope to a disillusioned activist who has lost his way, enlightenment to a man who always wondered what if, and reconciliation between a father and son.  What compelling imagery!

The gifts and calling of God are "without repentance", the Bible says.  They are irrevocable.  God places within each of us the talents He wants to develop, if we will surrender our lives and follow His will.  God gifts some to be artisans, others designers, others caregivers, others builders.  God gives people the ability to be teachers and entrepreneurs and entertainers and producers, farmers, writers, protectors, defenders.  He enables and empowers leaders and servants and craftsmen and stewards.  Every individual has a unique purpose, a God-made plan for their lives, a destiny.  And God wants to direct that destiny in order to bless us and make us a blessing to others.

But God also places a call upon every life, and it is the same call to all:  Come, and Go.  Come to me.  Come with me.  Come and let me change you.  Come and let me help you.  Come and let me mold you into My image and likeness so that you will be like Me.  Then Go for me.  Go into the world.  Go with the gospel message.  Go into the highways and the hedges.  Go and work in my field.  That is a universal calling, a command regardless of our gifts and pursuits.  Every person who responds to God's call to come receives God's call to go.  We are ambassadors of Christ in every station of life.

My Dad did a little bit of everything, both before and after he got saved.  He was a railroad telegrapher, an undercover narcotics cop, a night patrolman, a welder, an electrician, a brick layer, a construction foreman.  He could do practically anything he put his mind to, and did.  After he met Jesus, he continued in construction for nearly a decade, but while working to build oil refineries in the Texas Panhandle, he was also working for the Lord.  Armed with a palm-sized Bible and full of the Spirit, he began to share the Good News with his coworkers.  Some received and were Born Again.  Others rejected and continued in their ways.  But he was always a witness.  He led entire crews of Laotian and Central American refugees to the Lord.  He converted drug-dealing truck drivers.  Everywhere he worked, everywhere he went, He told people about Jesus.

Then God called him into full-time, what some have termed "vocational", ministry.  He left the workforce of the world and started pastoring churches, because that's what God wanted him to do.,  He didn't seek after good, big, healthy churches.  He took the hard ones, the burned over fields, the churches on the verge of closure and death.  He took responsibility for handfuls of little old people with one foot on heaven's doorstep, prayed for them and preached to them, all the while bringing more people to the Lord and into the church.  He had to fight for every ministry he ever had, and it did so because he knew what God had told him to do.  He went to Russia three times, and into Mexico countless times.  He left every church in far better shape than when he came.  When he died unexpectedly at the age of forty-nine after twenty-two years of serving the Lord with all his heart, it was with no reservation that we could say, "He fought the good fight, he finished his course, he kept the faith."

In other words, he did what God called him to do.

That was my example.  And I had many other fine examples who showed me how to fulfill the call of God on my life.  I've spent twenty-four years in full-time vocational ministry, with additional time served in the secular workforce when necessity or desire demanded it.  In case you think I've never done anything else, I put in several years at a Tru-Value Hardware store.  I sold, among other things, hardware, farm supplies, plumbing fixtures, gardening tools, paint, fencing, guns and ammo, techie gadgets, appliances, and manure.  I waxed floors, stacked lumber and pipe, counted inventory, ran computer reports, and stocked shelves.  I worked in a bank as a temp.  I sold pianos for a season.  I swept floors and cleaned toilets at a large church for six months.  I assisted a plumber once.  I sometimes substitute in the public school system.  And those are just the things I've gotten paid to do.  There are lots of other things I volunteered to do.

But regardless of what else I was doing with my life, I always tried to fulfill the call of God on my life.  You see, everyone's gifting is different, but every Christian's calling is the same:  to be God's representative in a world that desperately needs Him, to love and to serve, to proclaim the truth of His gospel to everyone everywhere, and ultimately to lead people to Jesus,  You don't have to be an ordained preacher to proclaim the gospel.  You don't have to be a theologian or religious expert to tell people about Jesus.  You just have to know Jesus and follow Him wherever he leads.