Our Unique Call

Excerpt from Henri Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith:

So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense. When people are starving only a few thousand miles away, when wars are raging close to our borders, when countless people in our cities have no homes to live in, our own activities look futile. Such considerations, however, can paralyze and depress us.

Here the word call becomes important. We are not called to save the world, solve all problems, and help all people. But each of us has our own unique call, in our families, in our work, in our world. We have to keep asking God to help us see clearly what our call is and to give us the strength to live out that call with trust. Then we will discover that our faithfulness to a small task is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time.

When we watch the news, read the papers, listen to the radio, watch a movie or a TV program, we see the world as it is—the global economic crisis, war in distant places, poverty, famine, AIDS, global warming, terrorism, genocide, corruption, child prostitution, and many other atrocities—things that are far from “our world” and the tiny bubble we have immersed ourselves in.

Sometimes we do think about these things but most of the time, we’ve become desensitized to our dying world. Not to say that these things don’t depress us. They do. Too much in fact that we’d rather not think about them because there’s nothing we can do. We can’t save the world. We can barely save ourselves from the things that concern and worry us.

A Premature Midlife Crisis

In America, people in their 20s and 30s typically concern about things like who to date/marry, whether to change jobs, what kind of a car to buy, saving enough to buy a home, how many kids to have, and which restaurants to go to for dinner, etc… And now with the economic recession, people worry a little more about other things like job security, paying mortgages, paying the bills, financial investments, etc…

We worry about these things too, but in recent years, we’ve had our share of other challenges and difficulties. Multiple hospitalizations. Chronic and sometimes life-threatening conditions. And now, the death of a sibling. It’s as if the roller coaster car we’ve been riding derailed and landed us in a midlife crisis, prematurely. (Jason turns 32 today.) At least we’re still alive but no one prepared us for this. Bystanders watch, completely stunned, and don’t know how to respond. A friend told us that most people don’t know what to say so they don’t say anything.

Silence is deafening. But so are the few words that are uttered. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “. . . I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. . . Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.” (from A Grief Observed)

No words will suffice but the bereaved left alone will rot. It’s a terrible dilemma.

The Beginning of Compassion

And so we remember that God, the Father of compassion, “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” (2 Cor. 1:3-5)

Our Lent reading earlier this week reminded us that we are taken, blessed, broken, and given. We have already been taken, blessed, and broken. Now the question is how are we or will we be given and what exactly does that mean. Nouwen calls us to keep asking God to help us see clearly our unique call and to give us the strength to live out that call.

We are thankful that God considered us worthy to partake in Christ’s suffering and that through our encounters with this dying world (and the illnesses of our time), we could glimpse into the compassionate heart of Jesus. It is this newfound compassion that gives us life so that we may give life to others.

Excerpt from Henri Nouwen’s Show Me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings:

This new identity . . . allows us to enter so fully and unconditionally into the sufferings of others that it becomes possible for us to heal the sick and call the dead to life. When we share in God’s compassion, a whole new way of living opens itself to us . . . Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. . .