Dinner's Ready!

If one perceives a calling, what is to be done with it? A mother calls her child in from playtime to eat dinner, and the child has the choice of ignoring it or answering it (the truth be known, there are a whole variety of ways between the two extremes that the child can respond). As a rule, incorrect responses are punished one way or another while the narrowly defined correct response is usually rewarded—perhaps by getting to eat. As I said earlier, the notion of being called is scripturally based, but where does the study and interpretation of scripture take place? To answer “organized religion” doesn’t require any particular genius, and my experience of organized religion was the Methodist church into which I was born and raised. It was altogether natural that I would adopt the logical deduction that since Dad was a minister of the church, Dad must have been called; therefore, if I was being called it was to the church’s ministry. The hindsight of my fifty-six years allows me to see the weakness of such a train of thought, but for a yearling that was trying to process what that “feeling” was and what it meant, it worked! And so the die was cast, so to speak, that the appropriate way to answer my calling was to follow the path into the ordained ministry of the Methodist church.