The Moment of Calling

I remember the moment of calling.  It has been so long ago that the night seems like one encased in ancient times, but to remember it causes it to be as fresh as yesterday.  It was a May night in the bedroom of the Alamo Methodist parsonage in the year I was graduating from high school.  My parents and sister were going about their business on the other side of my closed door not knowing that life changing business was taking place just beyond their sight.  And they would not know for some time as it was not a moment I eagerly embraced.    

While I did not know what I was going to do in my future, I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was ministry.  For six months or so I tried to talk my way out of what I knew to be a moment of divine calling.  Like Moses I found any number of reasons why God should look elsewhere.  But, the Voice of calling persisted.  It was not a Voice I could silence.  It was as if I had been gripped by Someone who would not let me go.    Such an experience is something I would later learn I had in common with many others who had wrestled with being called by God to do something which was outside the trajectory of personal plans.  

As we read the story of Moses in those early pages of Exodus, we see a man who was content tending his father-in-law's sheep somewhere in the obscurity of the wilderness.  The last place he wanted to go was Egypt.  In Egypt he was a wanted man.  God is full of surprises as He seeks to use the unlikely ones such as us to do holy work.  Whenever God calls there are usually a hundred reasons for not accepting the call and only one reason for saying "Yes" and that reason is that it has come from God.