Chapter 11. Keep interested in your own career, however humble. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 Kind

       Are you “career” or “called” minded?  There is a difference between the two.  They are also related as we will see.  When most people hear the word “called” there is an assumption that person is a spiritual leader of one sort or another.  When we use the word “career” or “vocation” the implication is about our legacy in the making.  Career can be a calling and calling can be a career.  Keeping interested in your career is important and necessitates our observing our career from God’s perspective.  Many go through the “movements” associated with our life or jobs while not having any interest in what the outcome is to be.  Life becomes repetitious and just another day.  Soon, people choose to despise what they do, and life becomes problematic and disillusioned.  When we are sufficiently “numbed” in an area of our life, the interest is gone and so is humbleness.  Our sense of thankfulness is gone, and the quality of our lives diminish leaving us apathetic and ineffective.  And so, our faith along with other aspects of our life becomes less and less of what God wants for us.  We walk away from what we once knew was our first love.  Our calling or career given by God when we were saved from ourselves and the world we live in.  In our selfishness we miss the opportunity for God to utilize what he has equipped us with.  The very same grace he gives us should be carried into whatever calling or career he places you in. 

       What we do comes to the surface as our true nature (sin) is more and more fully exposed.  Our longing for Jesus and our longing for mankind to understand and accept the grace of God is buried.  To be fair, Satan (the god of this world) has an ulterior motive for wanting us to NOT live for Christ.  He thinks his job is to hide the Gospel from the non-believers.  When we step away from our first love, Jesus, we leave that place where we once had fellowship with him and others who are serving him.  So it is when we do not answer the calling or career he has asked us to do.  This isn’t an overnight task for any of us.  This process of receiving a calling or a career happens when we are surrendered to Him.  The calling or career becomes increasingly expanded as we grow in Christ.  Our maturity in Christ is a key to our evolving calling or career.  To whom is given much, much is demanded.  Responsibility for what God has blessed us with comes with high expectations. 

I believe that being “humble” is necessary for us to be interested in our own careers.  Whenever I have inflated myself within a calling or career, God’s purpose has diminished in me.  With the fading of humility, the sin of the world becomes readily evident in different portions of my life.  The process is like water in a river eating away at the bank that contains it until the river has its way and life’s purpose is permanently altered.  Our choosing of Plan B takes us away from God’s Plan A.  When we move into Plan B the river gains more momentum and power.  Then Plan B takes on a life of its own.  The Plan A we began with, is now permanently altered even if we return.  We miss the opportunities and joys of what Plan A would have bestowed on us as well as others.  Once rerouted the river can never go back to its original path.  So, it is with us.  The original calling is gone. 

I wrote earlier about listening to the voice of God in our everyday lives.  The choice of which way to work was intended to imply that God has a plan in minute detail should we decide to listen and obey.  Many times, when I chose what route I felt God wanted me to take I would catch myself looking across the valley at a parallel roadway seeing how traffic was going there.  Sometimes I caught myself wishing I had taken the other route.  The choice had been made.  I could either humbly obey or begrudgingly obey.  In either case there was no way to undo the decision.  Sometimes I made the choice and usually suffered because that choice was made by me and not God.  You can never go back and redo any moment.  Once that moment has passed the whole direction of our lives is changed for all eternity.  Remember that God always has another Plan A ready when we return to his will.  It will not be the same Plan A given last time.  Time cannot be altered in the past.  When we humbly obey regardless of what we or the world thinks, everything will be alright.

       As a second observation, the Desiderata specifies what we are to keep interest in; “your own career.”  Not your neighbor’s career nor your best friend’s career; but the career where you find yourself.  Having our lives shaped by anything other than God’s calling results in our becoming what the world expects of us.  People proclaim, in a prophetic (and wrong) sense, what we are becoming.  We are told we are expected to go into this or that field of work based on our abilities and how they have either soared or crashed and burned.  If you don’t agree please tell me where any public school encourages students to have a career/calling to be a pastor or a missionary.  Others have gone against this and followed a calling/career that emboldens them to break free from the stereotype that governs so many.  To do so is to risk being a maverick, pioneer, oddball or revolutionary by those who aren’t.  We know this to be true.  So, instead of keeping interest in our careers; we instead use “their” careers to justify the calm of our career.  We defend the box and condemn those who choose otherwise.  As you well know “they” are worse than “us” and so we feel better about our failure to follow the career/calling God has for us.

       Having painted ourselves into a proverbial corner; we find new and improved ways to justify our place in society.  Having done so, we avoid, and at the same time, defend and are disenchanted with where and what we are.  What we have become either is rationalized or justified and the humbleness of a calling is gone.  Our attention becomes focused on surviving instead of discovery.  Our dreams are replaced with repetition of everyday actions and reactions.  We lose the joy of living.  This does not happen to everyone and is found in various levels of symptoms of those who are infected.  Where you and I are found within this portrayal is as individual as each of us and as corporate as we have become.  When the institutions of our world begin defining what we are to be; individuality is lost.  We become a worker who goes to work to pay the bills and returns home to fulfill the role of spouse, father and friend.  Over the decades our religious institutions have also changed to support this characterization.  Where once there was a freedom of slavery and commonness, individuality and newness have been injured and in some cases killed.  Fresh ideas and feelings of individual importance has been corralled in the interest inclusion all of us into the lowest rung of the ladder.  Is this what we really want?  Is this what you want?  Is this what God wants? No, no, and no.

       In our desire to stay disgruntled with our place in life we become bitter towards those who have, or appeared to have, followed a dream or calling.  Remember where we talked of not comparing ourselves with others?  Here we are in the process of comparing ourselves to others.  We also use where or what others are to boost our standing.  In so doing, we learn to “feel” better about not “being like them.”  Instead of humbleness we find ourselves in discontent with ourselves and others alike.  Instead of humbleness there is anger and jealousy.  Instead of humbleness we do what we need to get by rather than all that we can.  Individuals become part of a group and personal identity is seen less and less.  Instead of seeing others as Jesus does, we see others in the “less than” category of people.  Our daily lives and repetition convince us that this is all there is.  We buy the lie.  We not only cannot be kind with others, but we cannot even be kind with ourselves.  Mercy from God is nowhere to be found.   

How do we become kind people and what does this have to do with a career or calling?  There are a lot of aspects in our lives that depend upon this small, simple word; “kind”.  Kindness, like love, begins with us.  Do we show kindness to ourselves?  Are we loving towards ourselves?  If we are to be called Christians; we need to accept the premise that we can only give away that which we have received.  Our ability to love then is dependent upon that level of love we show towards ourselves in humility.  If we do not believe we are lovable we also feel that towards others.  Should we accept the love of God in our lives we will have tapped into our career and calling.  God’s imperative is that we accomplish only two actions in our lives.  The first is to love God with all our being.  The second is to love others as God has loved us.  This is not as simple as it sounds for most of us.  Most of us put upon ourselves a layer of guilt like a layer of frosting on a cake.  We know that inside is the cake, but we can’t see past the frosting.  Many of us love cake for the frosting and miss out on the cake and filling. 

I’ve often said that there are only two absolutes in life; death and taxes.  Yet, we are challenged to surrender ALL our being when asking God to come in and take charge of our lives.  God has told us that he will not violate our free will.  We need to surrender our free will to God to do and be what he designed our lives to do and be.  For this to happen God wants us to realistically count the cost of following him and only him.  It is His will that should not only captivate our attention but also propel us forward in service to that will.  I’m not always very good about doing this.  In fact, the inner rebellious child is still surfacing after surrendering my life in October of 1972.  Why do I keep that inner child/adult alive?  Quite frankly, this is true because I, like all of us, hold onto things from the past.  Sometimes this is a conscious decision and other times the subconscious drives us.  Perhaps it is the same for you.  Perhaps you struggle to surrender as well.  You are not alone. 

On October 1, 1972 I surrendered to Jesus and gave him my life.  He became my first love.  He was my calling and my career.  It was his kindness to me a sinner that kindled the fire of that first love.  For the next 2 years I grew and matured much in the Lord.  I longed for time to read the Word and prayer.  It was my pleasure to pray with others as they received the Lord into their lives.  I had what I called my “second” job during the day.  My real job was living for Jesus.  So, what happened?  What happened is I went astray?  My selfishness slowly came to the surface and consumed me.  It was my choice to do so.  My informed decision to sin against my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  As I became increasingly distant from that first love, sin followed in becoming a controlling part of my life.  My calling/career was dying.  Eventually my choices would lead me even further away from my first love until the consequences were visible to those around me.  Still I didn’t turn around!  I put aside the kindness and calling and embraced that which God abhors.  Even though I was saved, I was lost.  Have you felt that way?  Are you a Christian who has enjoyed that first love only to have the desire drift out of your life?  Is your career/calling from God or from man?  What am I supposed to be doing?  What are you supposed to be doing?  I can tell you this much; it’s not sinning.  There is no kindness in sin.  There is no humbleness in a calling or career that is not given by God. 

So, what do we do?  What do I do?  What do you do?  That individual choice affects the corporate whole.  That goes both ways.  Our choices can bring positive or negative consequences not only into our lives but also into the lives of those around us.  Sin “always” brings negative consequences.  Obedience “always” brings positive consequences.  Likewise, when tempted we can adopt one of two attitudes.  The first one (most beneficial to all) is to not take adversity brought on by obedience personally.  If the Word is correct we should understand that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me.”  Thus, adversity isn’t towards us but rather Christ in us.  God states time and time again that he is sufficient.  He has conquered sin and death.  I said there were two attitudes.  The second one is to take everything personally.  When we do this, we put distance between Christ and ourselves.  Remember, if you aren’t feeling close to God, guess who moved!  It takes us just a few moments to look at the life of Job.  What happened to Job can and does happen to those still in this world.  We ask why those called by God have adversity.  That isn’t the right question. 

The right question to man is almost never the right question for those serving God.  For the believer who is called by God to be a Christian in any vocation that God places you in, the right question to adversity is “Why not!”  There is a transformation we who know Christ have gone through upon our salvation.  We are no longer of this world.  We live here physically but our real home is Heaven.  We are sojourners longing to be home.  We “occupy” space in this world but are not owned by it.  The home we own isn’t on this or any other planet.  The calling or career is not of man but of God.  The kindness that has been bestowed upon us we in turn bestow on those around us.  When we sin (not if) we have only one step to take to get back on track.  Repentance. 

This year I turn 61.  I am thankful that yet again, God has allowed me to wake up on the right side of the grass.  He has given me one more moment to be his love to a lost and hurting world.  One more moment…doesn’t seem like much.  Maybe it isn’t for us.  Maybe we aren’t supposed to be living that moment for ourselves.  Are you able to understand this very simple career plan?  Our “career” is to bring glory to God with what he has provided.  What he has provided is grace.  Grace is the greatest kindness.  Grace giving is the greatest career.  Let’s read the Word and have sweet communion with God and bring grace to the world around us.  It’s our calling.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

       Can you begin to see this wisdom reflects what God would have in your life?  While each is separate, all are connected.  We are separate in Christ and yet connected to all believers in Christ.  In kindness, enjoy your achievements as well as His plans.