What It Means to Be Called
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” — Jeremiah 1:5
Before You Read
Have you ever felt a pull toward something a specific kind of work, a way of serving, a purpose that won’t leave you alone that you’ve been afraid to take seriously?
Do you believe that calling is only for pastors and missionaries or has something in you always suspected it might be for you too?
What would you do with your life if you were completely sure God had called you to it?
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The word calling gets thrown around in Christian circles in a way that has made it both overused and underunderstood.
On one end of the spectrum, calling has been so inflated that it sounds like it only applies to people who quit their jobs to go to the mission field or plant a church or build an orphanage in a developing country. It sounds dramatic and certain and usually involves a moment of unmistakable divine communication that most ordinary people never experience and so most ordinary people conclude that calling is something that happens to other people. More spiritual people. People who are wired for that kind of thing.
On the other end, calling has been so democratized that it has lost all meaning applied to every preference and inclination and passing interest until it means nothing more than the thing I happen to feel like doing right now.
Neither of these gets it right. And both of them have left a lot of people either waiting for a dramatic calling they may never receive or dismissing the quiet, persistent, specific pull they’ve been feeling for years because it doesn’t seem significant enough to qualify.
What it looks like in a real human life. And why the thing you’ve been dismissing as too ordinary, too small, or too specific to you might be exactly what God has been trying to say for longer than you’ve been willing to hear it.
What the Word Actually Means
The concept of calling in Scripture is not primarily about career. It is not about finding the right job or the most spiritually impressive way to spend your life. It is about purpose the specific, intentional, God-designed reason you exist and what you are here to contribute to the world.
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The Greek word for calling is klesis from the verb kaleo, to call or summon. It carries the sense of being specifically addressed not a general announcement made to a crowd but a specific word directed at a specific person. God calling your name. Not a name that fits a category you belong to. Your actual name.
Jeremiah 1:5 makes this personal in a way that can take your breath away if you let it: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” Before Jeremiah existed. Before he had done anything, chosen anything, demonstrated anything. God knew him specifically, personally, completely and set him apart. For something. With intention. On purpose.
That is not a statement about Jeremiah’s specialness relative to everyone else. It is a statement about how God relates to every person He makes. He does not mass-produce human beings and then hope they find something useful to do. He forms each one with knowledge yada, the deep, intimate, comprehensive knowledge of someone you love and sets them apart for something that fits the specific person they are.
You were not an accident. You were not a generic product off a divine assembly line. You were formed with knowledge, set apart with intention, and equipped whether you feel equipped or not for something specific.
The Call That Comes to Ordinary People
Here is one of the most consistently overlooked patterns in all of Scripture: God almost never calls the impressive people.
He calls Moses a man with a speech impediment and a criminal record, tending sheep in the wilderness after forty years of irrelevance. He calls Gideon hiding in a winepress from the enemy, so convinced of his own insignificance that when the angel of the Lord calls him a mighty warrior he essentially says: have you seen me? He calls David the youngest son, so obviously not the chosen one that his father didn’t even bring him in from the field when Samuel came to anoint the next king. He calls Rahab a prostitute in a pagan city. He calls Matthew a tax collector, a collaborator with Rome, the kind of person the religious establishment had written off entirely.
He calls fishermen and tentmakers and ordinary people living ordinary lives who have no particular reason to believe they are the kind of people God calls.
This is not a coincidence. Paul makes it explicit in 1 Corinthians 1:27–28: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” The weakness, the ordinariness, the apparent unsuitability these are not obstacles God is working around. They are features of how He works. Because when the ordinary person does the extraordinary thing, the credit goes to the right place.
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Which means your ordinariness is not a disqualification. Your lack of credentials, your unremarkable background, your sense that you are not the kind of person who gets called none of these are the factors God is working from. He is working from something He sees in you that you may not be able to see from inside your own skin.
The call comes to ordinary people. It has always come to ordinary people. And it is coming to you.
The Message
I want to address something that keeps a lot of people from taking their calling seriously.
The idea that calling has to feel certain before you can act on it.
Most people who have genuinely been called to something and looked back years later from inside it did not receive certainty before they stepped. They received a pull. A persistent, recurring, won’t-leave-me-alone pull toward something specific. A sense that they were made for something they haven’t fully stepped into yet. A restlessness in the direction of a particular thing that didn’t resolve no matter how much they tried to be satisfied without it.
That pull is not certainty. It doesn’t come with a guarantee. It doesn’t remove the risk or the fear or the very real possibility of failure. It is just a pull quiet, persistent, specific and the question is whether you are going to take it seriously enough to move toward it.
Jeremiah’s call came with an immediate objection: “Alas, Sovereign Lord, I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”Moses said: “Who am I that I should go?” Gideon said: “My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” The pattern of objection is consistent and God’s response is consistent too. He does not argue with the objection. He does not provide a comprehensive plan that removes all uncertainty. He says: I will be with you. That is the answer. Not a guarantee of smooth sailing. The presence of the One who called you in the calling itself.
Your calling does not require you to feel ready. It does not require you to have figured out the whole path. It requires you to take the next step in the direction of the pull the one step that is visible from where you’re standing and trust that the God who called you is present in the stepping.
Calling Is Not Always What You Think
There is a version of calling that looks like a dramatic pivot the person who leaves the corporate career to start the nonprofit, who sells everything to go overseas, who makes the bold, visible, obviously God-directed move that everyone can see and celebrate.
That version is real. And it is genuinely not for most people.
Most callings are quieter than that. More embedded in ordinary life. More specific to a particular person’s particular combination of gifts, experiences, relationships, and position.
The teacher who has a specific, unmistakable gift for reaching the kids everyone else has given up on that is a calling. Not a consolation prize for people who didn’t get a dramatic one. A specific, intentional, God-designed purpose for a specific person.
The person in a difficult workplace who consistently, without fanfare, brings a quality of integrity and care that changes the culture around them that is a calling.
The parent who is raising children with intentionality and love and faith in a way that will ripple into generations they will never meet that is a calling.
The friend who has a specific, God-given ability to sit with people in their darkest moments without flinching and without offering cheap comfort that is a calling. One of the most important ones available.
The person whose suffering has given them access to other suffering people in a way that no amount of training could have produced whose wound has become their credential that is a calling.
Calling is not the size of the platform. It is the fit between who God made you and what He is asking you to do. The calling that fits you the specific you, with your specific history and gifts and limitations is the most important calling in the world. Not because it is impressive. Because it is yours.
How to Find Yours
If you are not sure what your calling is or if you have a sense of it but have been afraid to take it seriously here are the questions worth sitting with.
What breaks your heart consistently? Not occasionally, not when it’s in the news consistently. The thing that stops you, that makes you feel the weight of it even when everyone around you has moved on. That consistent breaking is often a compass pointing toward what you are specifically designed to care about.
What comes naturally to you that feels like work to others? The gift that is so embedded in how you’re wired that you don’t think of it as a gift you assume everyone can do it. They can’t. That naturalness is information.
What do you find yourself doing even when no one is asking and there is no reward? The thing you gravitate toward in your free time, the conversations you find yourself initiating, the problems you keep thinking about solutions to that pull toward something in the absence of external motivation is one of the clearest indicators of calling.
Where have your wounds given you access? The things you have been through that most people haven’t the specific suffering, the particular hardship, the experience that cost you something and left a mark. Those experiences have given you access to people in those same places that no one without the experience can have. That access is often the most direct road to your calling.
And what has God been persistently saying that you have been persistently avoiding? The thing you already know the pull you’ve been dismissing or deferring or telling yourself you’ll get to when the timing is better. That thing.
A Real Story
Susan was a nurse for twenty-two years. Good at her job. Respected by colleagues. But she had a specific pull that had been present for fifteen years that she kept talking herself out of.
She wanted to work with patients who were dying. Specifically, hospice. The end of life. The most vulnerable, the most frightened, the most in need of someone who could be present in the dark without flinching.
She kept dismissing it. It seemed too heavy. Too sad. Too much of a step down from the more impressive work she was doing. She told herself it was a phase and waited for the pull to go away.
It didn’t.
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At forty-seven she finally made the move. She said the first week in hospice she felt something she had not felt in years the sense of being completely in the right place. Of doing the specific thing she was made to do. Not because it was easy. Because it fit.
She said: I spent fifteen years talking myself out of the thing God had been pointing me toward the entire time. The pull never went away. I just kept ignoring it. When I finally stopped ignoring it I understood what people mean when they talk about calling. It’s not a feeling of certainty. It’s a feeling of fit. Like something that was slightly wrong finally clicked into place.
Closing Journal Prompts
What is the pull you’ve been feeling that you haven’t taken seriously yet? Write about it without dismissing it what is it, how long have you felt it, and why have you been avoiding it?
What objection do you make to your own calling most often and what does God’s consistent response to objections in Scripture say to that objection?
Where have your wounds given you access that other people don’t have? Write about how that access might be a calling rather than just a hardship.
What is the one next step in the direction of your calling that is visible from where you’re standing right now?
Today’s Prayer:Lord, I think You’ve been saying something to me that I’ve been avoiding. A pull that I’ve dismissed as too small or too big or too uncertain or too much. Today I want to stop dismissing it and start listening. Show me what You saw when You formed me the specific purpose You set me apart for before I was born. Not the impressive version, not the version that would make sense to everyone around me the real one. The one that fits the specific person You made when You made me. Give me the courage to take it seriously. The wisdom to take the next step even without certainty. And the trust that the God who called me is present in the calling itself. I am listening. Amen.
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