I was asked to write a short piece about “The Wonder of Vocations”. What would you write? Let me ask some questions then. How do we find our vocation? How do we discover what God wants us to do with our lives?
My answer begins here: We don’t need another hero, as Tina Turner sang. I don’t want to lose you, so please read on.
The Bible is full of exciting stories about people chosen by God. But there is a huge risk that we read these stories in the same way we read popular fiction. We look for heroes and then we unconsciously imagine ourselves in their shoes and think the moral of the story is that if we just do what they did, then all will be fine. However, there are some serious problems with this.
Firstly, each of them is unique and different. We are not the same person in the same context at the same time in history. We are different. There’s no such thing as the typical male or female.
But could we learn some principles from what happened?
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work very well either, because often the point of the story is that they messed up. They did the wrong thing! Don’t try this at home…
Hebrews 11 (read this please) tells us that the better ones, who did some great things by faith, also had terrible things happen to them. They were tortured, chained, imprisoned, stoned, sawn in half, persecuted, tormented. Not good news, is it? That’s the way of the world.
So we are called instead to love. What’s love got to do with it? (I hear you say). According to the Bible, we love because He first loved us. We love God and our neighbour in response to His love for us.
You see, the stories in the Bible are each just a part of a much bigger story. The story is God’s big plan from creation to revelation. You could say there is only one big wonderful point.
The Wonder is that there is only one Big Hero and his name is Jesus. The Bible is not about us but about Him. He’s simply the best, better than all the rest.