A Calling and a Destiny

What has 2020 shown you? Can I share with you a few things that it’s shown me?

 If 2020 has taught me something, it’s that we are not in complete control of our lives.

How many of us expected a worldwide pandemic to flip our lives upside down? School, shopping, banking, medical care, voting…so much of our normal routine changed in such drastic ways, in so little time. Our jobs were cut, furloughed, modified to a completely different format…and some of us who were looking for a job before COVID-19 hit may have had to rewrite our job search criteria a bit (or quite a bit).

I have also seen anger and division grow into a firestorm that has consumed a nation, communities, and even homes. During election season, many of us probably took a stand on a particular side. Others of us may have considered ourselves nonpartisan and instead watched the bitter battle unfold from a distance. However, I bet none of us could escape the fiery shouts, the endless headlines rolling across our TV and computer screens…and pulling out our hair in complete frustration.

If 2020 has shed light on something, it’s that panic and rage cannot solve problems. But I don’t think 2020 served its full purpose if we view it just in terms of what doesn’t work.

I think this year has also taught us a lot about what does work. This year, though painful, has the potential to strengthen us in the deepest and purest of ways.

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To my fellow believers in Jesus, and to myself, I ask: Why do we believe in God?

Really, why do we? In a world that can so often embody humanism and the gratification of our desires, why do we believe in a God who is all about the casting off of our selfish thoughts and instead thinking of our neighbors before ourselves?

To my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and to myself, I ask: What does it mean to be a child of God?

Really, what does it mean? In a world of numerous identities and ideologies, why do we choose to belong to the camp of Jehovah above all else?

 Times like these can bring these questions to the forefront in full force — questions that we need to ask ourselves as Christians in a tainted world.

Our Father knows how easy it is for us to fall into unholy ways, to embark on paths marked out by human feet and not by God’s, to speak and act in ways not becoming of a redeemed lamb of the Shepherd. We can often take the reins of the world into our own hands, rather than entrusting them to the all-knowing, all-powerful Lord. We can put too much trust in the brains and brawn of man, rather than in the omniscient Creator of this universe.

So, why do we believe in God? Why do we believe in him when we can act, feel, and speak so unlike him?

We believe, dearest friends, because we were called.

Maybe a lot of us didn’t realize it when we were, because we were too young to understand it. Even before time as we know it was established, God had known us, and what we would be:

“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will…”

Ephesians 1:4-5

He worked through your parents, who were compelled by their God-given faith to bring you to the baptismal font when you were a child. If you were called later in life, he worked through the people who told you about him, his Word that you read in the Bible, and that very same baptism that brings children to faith.

We have been called to believe, purely out of God’s holy love and mercy.

And now, as redeemed souls, we no longer have to look at this finite world and its happenings as our one and only destiny. Though we must live in it and endure it for a while, we can look forward in hope to a greater destiny: eternity with the great I AM in his kingdom, where there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4). Oh, what a happy day that will be!!

While we are here, though, God calls us again, this time to share the good news with the whole world.

A world that, like our own hearts at times, is wrapped up in the black, choking ropes of sin and needs the saving faith that we now have by God’s grace.

Only the light of Christ can break those ropes — and God has chosen us to be the carriers of that light. These times are burdensome and frightening for all of us. Nevertheless, we are called to love with the same love that God emanates. We, despite our flaws and fears, are called to point the world to the cross of Jesus.

There and only there, at the feet of Christ’s cross, can all of us find the one thing that makes the events of 2020 not a burden to defeat us, but rather, an arrow that guides us to the one and only Way to life: “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

“In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

1 Peter 1:6-7