Continuing from Jerry Sittser’s ‘Discovering Our Calling II’ . . . .
Life Experience
Third, life experiences can have a similar effect. Sometimes what happens to us pushes us toward a calling. A young woman whose husband dies of cancer goes to work for Hospice. A college student who hated junior high becomes a popular and effective counselor in a junior high school. A woman who endured years of abuse opens a clinic for battered women. A man who grew up in a lukewarm church becomes a successful evangelist. In each case, life experience awakens them to their calling.
Sometimes the propelling event can be an insignificant experience that happens at just the right time. Masterpiece Theater, a PBS program, ran a dramatic presentation of the true story of British actress Carol Atkins. While attending a charity event for a children’s home, Atkins met a little girl whose painful past and obvious need for love awakened terrible memories of Atkins’ childhood. She was so moved by the experience that she gave up her glamorous career as an actress to start a home for disturbed children, a venture that turned out to be both wonderful and harrowing. The course her life took turned on that one ordinary experience of attending a charity event.
The experience of suffering can have a similar effect, as Anthony Storr, lecturer in clinical psychiatry at Oxford, argues in Solitude: A Return to the Self. He recounts stories whose suffering in prison set them on a course of writing or gave them insight that they would not otherwise have had. Their confinement isolated them, stirred their creativity, and enlarged their perspective on life. It inspired them to write on the human condition.
John Bunyan, for example, wrote his autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666), and began his classic work, The Pilgrims Progress, during the twelve years he spent in the Bedford county jail for his Nonconformist beliefs. His works convey profound insight into temptation and suffering. His experience in jail helped him perceive the depths of human sin and to explore the wonder of God’s plan of salvation. Dostoyevsky developed his philosophy of life and laid out plots for several of his stories and novels during the years he spent in a Siberian prison camp. His suffering became like a voice, calling him to ask and answer the most profound questions of life. Dostoyevsky would have been a writer whether or not he spent time in prison. He would not have written, however, with the same insight and power.6 ~Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004). 176-78
Open and closed doors
A fourth factor in discovering our calling is opportunity. They constitute what Elisabeth Elliot categorizes as “circumstances.” She believes that God can and does use circumstances to lead us. “Circumstances are, without question, part of God’s will. . . . It is a normal assumption of faith that he will use circumstances to nudge me in the right direction.”7
Opportunities represent the proverbial “open door” that comes along every so often. . . .
(Fourth and Fifth factors to come. . .)
