Semi-Worms (Exiles #4)

Today’s daily serving of wormage (chock full of natural flavor, taste, and over 1800 essential vitamins and nutrients in a savory sauce) comes courtesy of chapter eight of Frost’s sagacious tome, Exiles.

“Working for the Host Empire” explores how missional Christians should view their workplace or career. While that’s not news to many of us, Frost does an excellent job of sorting through the old dualistic, Plato-inspired, “sacred vs. secular” dichotomy, focusing particularly on our concept of vocation.

As usual, Frost stimulated the grey matter between my ears (which, according to CSI, resembles a bowl of worms – coincidence?), and I’d like to add my two cents to a thought that Frost presents:

“We routinely refer to people ‘receiving the call’ to Christian service, whether to church leadership or the mission field … We can easily think of a friend entering church-ordained ministry as following God, but rarely do we speak of a decision to become a computer programmer or a nurse or a filmmaker or an accountant as similarly following God’s calling in our lives (Exiles, page 185).”

Frost makes some excellent points about the impact of churches succumbing to a dualistic, sacred/secular divide, resulting in everyday congregants Joe and Josephine feeling there’s no God-given “call” on their vocational lives. It was all up to them – go ahead, choose a profession. Any profession. Just remember to tithe in support of pastoral staff who answered a call.

It never occurred to Joe or Josephine – and no one encouraged them – to ask God for His input on their vocational path.

Funny aside from that same mindset:

I have friends who, back in the day, actively avoided praying about their vocation, out of a knee-jerk suspicion that if they allowed God to have His say, they’d end up doing something they hated in a location where angels feared to tread.

If, instead, we began with the expectation that everything we are and have is God’s, praying for His “call” in our vocation would be the normal, default setting.

Or as my good friend, Nico-Dirk, once said, “What’s all this talk about ‘giving’ ourselves to God? If you’re a Christian, God already owns your entire a**!”

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