“This is God calling..
.?’
Revd Guy Donegan-Cross.
Curate, Christchurch, Old Town, Swindon
It was dark, all was
still and quiet as I lay in my bed. Suddenly a breath of wind brushed my cheek.
I stirred, becoming slowly aware of an approaching light permeating the
sluggish limits of my consciousness. “Get up! You are on holy ground!” a voice
seemed to be telling me. In a flash of holy inspiration I realised I was face
to face with God! I fell to the floor of my bedroom in awe, brushing socks out
of the way. God spoke: “Listen carefully... I want you to become.. .a vicar!’
If only. I am afraid the
truth of how I have got to the point of being a curate in Swindon is far more mundane,
and would probably never make a great Hollywood movie. That’s not to say it
hasn’t been exciting, and that I don’t have some confidence in God’s
calling (and the process of selection that has accompanied it). But my
understanding of how God calls us to anything, whether it be wearing a
dog collar, creating art, building roads, or nouveau cuisine, revolves more
around how we work out what he’s saying to us in the rhythm, warp and woof of
the stuff of everyday life, than through moments of Spielberg-type revelation.
But how does God call us
to something like the ministry? It’s different for everybody, so don’t look at
my story as a yardstick for yours. However, there are some general pointers
that might be helpful.
The jigsaw effect. There was never one
particular thing that did it for me. It was more a sense of the pieces fitting
together - what other people said
about me, where I felt my talents lay, what motivated me and made me excited,
how I felt before God in prayer, the appeal of wearing a cassock (joke)...
Recurring vibes. After a particularly
gruelling year working in a church aged 19, I put the idea of ever getting
ordained firmly to the back of my mind, and asked God to bring it to the front
again when and if it was the right time. Generally speaking, if you’ve been
trying to ignore something, and it keeps coming back to haunt you, God could be
trying to say something... For people for whom the thought of being ordained
fills them with terror, this could be important.
Wise guys. Talking to people I
respected, who wouldn’t just tell me what I wanted to hear, was always helpful.
My wife and I also went on a vocations weekend (like the one run by Trinity
College) to explore deeper. They seemed to want to put everyone off - there were a lot of depressed vicars
giving seminars! But it was useful, and made us delay applying for a while to
do other things.
Holy dissatisfaction. I don’t know if this is
just my temperament, but if you suffer from the “dis-ease” of frequently
feeling things could be done better by
the Church, you could
quite easily see this as a symptom of being called to do something about it
yourself (although you don’t necessarily have to get ordained, of course!). To
put it in more spiritual language, if you have a vision, or a “burden” for
God’s people, then what is the best way you can help to put that vision into
practice?
“I think that, as far as
I know, I
may be called...” It’s always good to maintain a healthy humility
about the limits of your own capacity for understanding God’s will. That’s not
to say we don’t want to hunger and thirst for words from God, but that when we
get them, we need to remind ourselves that, for now, we are seeing “through a
glass darkly”. This helped me never to throw all my eggs completely in
the one basket, and more importantly, to make God himself the focus of
my search, and not the “calling”.
Being myself. At the end of the day,
whatever you think God wants you to wear around your neck, you are being called
to exercise any ministry through your own personality, your own talents and
your weaknesses. Don’t let going through a selection process mould you into
what you think they want you to be. They assure us that it will show anyway! On
the other hand, if it comes to a selection conference...
Be prepared. Again, maybe this is just
my temperament, but I found it useful to work through some of the basic
questions and issues that I might expect to have to discuss at a selection
conference, and jot down some notes. Not so I could fool anyone, but just to
give me the confidence to know that I wasn’t going to freeze up, and that I
would be able to give as full a picture as possible of where I was at.
More on ABM . With the selectors, it’s a game of
trust. They tell you that they are on your side, and you really have to believe
that - otherwise you are just
off on the wrong foot (as far as I know, suspicion is not a gift of the
Spirit). There are legendary scare stories, and one selector started the
interview by saying I had a split personality (Oh no I haven’t! Oh yes you
have!), but basically, if you go in expecting the best, you will be more able
to be yourself.
The Bible, prayer,
experience, gut feeling and common sense all tell me that God has a calling for
everyone, and it’s probably a cocktail of these that he has used to prod me to
ordination. If there’s a final piece of advice to chew on, it’s probably the
old cliche, “Push the door and see if it opens.” Life is short, there are lots
of opportunities ahead in the kingdom of God. Hearing God’s call for me at
least has been more of an active process than a passive waiting around. Even if
I sometimes wish he would shout at me in bed...