Vocation

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as part of my new attempt at scheduling in TAWG (Time alone with God) in my life, amongst other things. One of the things that keeps coming up is vocation. Now I like to think that I'm pretty sure what I want to do with my life - and that's work out who I am and what it means to live how God intended me to. I don't stress heaps over what job I'm going to end up in, and that hasn't bothered me for a long time. Of course, there are jobs I would like to do, but ultimately, it's because of what I think my vocation in life is.

I feel called to give up things for others, to serve others and be lower than them. I feel that's just the way it should be for me. I feel a particular pull towards issues of poverty and injustice, and feel like I not only should, but can, and was meant to be doing something about that. Not solving it, but adding my effort. I don't want to be defined by my actions, but by the motives I had to do them. Sometimes I do get a case of the 'wanting attention for doing good stuff', but I mostly do it because I want to show love and care.

Where am I going with all this? Well, the people who's vocations I've been reading about scare me in how far they threw themselves in the deep end. People like Rosa Parks or Mother Teresa. The latter is the one I read today. At the age of 18, she got the feeling that she should be doing something with the poor, and she was called towards India. So she left her family - never to see her mother again - and just moved. She didn't even speak the language or have any training. Then after living in the nunnery, she decided it was time for the next step, and moved to the streets. She did things nobody else in the church would do, like begging for clothes, medicine, money, all to give to the poor ones around her. How do you have that much faith that God is telling you something? That what you think you're hearing is right? What if you're wrong?

I feel called to the poor. I still feel like I'm not doing enough. At Surrender last year, I was really challenged because we were hearing from people who have given up everything to go be with the poor and live like them, in order to help them side-by-side. I felt I was so far away from this, because I still worry about clothes and other material things, and spend my money carelessly. I was challenged once again on Sunday, when at Vetamorphus we were discussing why Jesus spoke so much about wealth and money. I think it was because he knew how much humans would obsess over it, and that it would be a major obstacle in them coming to know him. The passages that have always been confronting are ones like the Rich Young Man, when he's told to give up everything, or the man who keeps a little bit for himself instead of giving it to the apostles to distribute as needed, and ends up dying. What does this say about how I'm supposed to live?

If my vocation dictates (as far as I can tell), that I am to help the poor, I think I need to break free of the shallowness and humiliation (on my behalf) of having to stop living the way I live, and using my money wiser and only as needed, and use the rest to help others. It's extreme. It means I won't be able to do lots of things I'd like to do personally. I don't know where to draw the line and it's scary. I don't know how to have that much faith in something. It's something that I've become so good at procrastinating over, I barely think of it, until that once in a while that it comes back and hits me in the face. Each time it's stronger, and this time it's massive. So where to from here? I have no idea. Feel very, very confused at the moment. I am inspired though, and even if I don't go to that extreme (yet), I can start making smaller steps towards getting there.