Last Sunday, 30th April, was Vocations Sunday – I was at a church in Sheffield where the Canon Missioner was presiding and preaching. Not unexpectedly, he was talking about Vocations! Perhaps more surprisingly, he said he was not going to talk about ordination, which is what most people might expect.
He reminded us that we first answer our vocation to serve Jesus at our baptisms, whenever they might be, as babes in arms or as adults able to answer for ourselves. He then went on to say that God calls us to serve Him in as many different ways as we can imagine – not only in those jobs we might think of as broadly ‘vocational’, medicine, teaching, preaching and so on, but in whatever we do. As a shop assistant, a bus driver, a steeplejack or even, perhaps, as a King! Whatever we do, if it is done with cheerfulness and grace, we bear witness to Our Lord and to his Father and fulfil our calling as His children.
I wrote recently about trying to move outside our comfort zones, our preacher on Vocations Sunday said the opposite, that perhaps God was calling us to do that which makes us happiest and, as a result, probably that which we do best.
In Isaiah, the prophet writes ‘I have called you by name, you are mine.’ What an amazing thought, God knows us all by name, he calls us by name, and he wants us to be His, just as we are.
[Jo Spray]