Articles - From the Vicar

Dear Friends

What is your vocation, your calling? Perhaps you would answer that you don't have one; that vocations are things for priests, doctors, perhaps even teachers, but not for lawyers and accountants, plumbers and engineers, housewives or the retired. But as a Christian I believe that we all have a calling, or many callings. Actually, I would prefer to say that God is calling everyone, because "calling" isn't a thing that we have but what God is doing to us. He is calling us to be and do many things, and these can change as our life develops. When we were young we were called to be children, sons and daughters, school children and friends. Later we may be called to the single life, or to marriage, and perhaps to being a parent, uncle, aunt or grandparent.

We are also, all of us, called by God to take the gifts and energies that we have and to use them in our working lives - whether paid or unpaid. This may be in a life-long career, or it may be in a variety of different roles. I realise that sometimes it can be hard to see what we do in our working lives as an expression of our faith. But if we believe that God is concerned with the whole of life then even the most practical aspects of life matter to him. With this in mind we are planning on running a short course soon to help us think about the connections between our working lives and our faith.

However God goes on calling us when we enter the thing we call "retirement" and this can be a very creative time in our lives as new opportunities open up. Sometimes these are a development of the things we were involved in on a voluntary basis in our younger days. One of these "voluntary" activities, but only one, may be our involvement in church life. God calls us into far more things than explicitly Christian activity, but he does call many or most of us to have a role of some kind in church life. For some this calling takes shape as a calling to Reader ministry or ordination.

Being a church in which all kinds of callings are nurtured is important if we are to faithful to the God who gives us gifts, puts us in different contexts, and calls us to make the most of them. As part of this, later this month on Pentecost Sunday we will be having a visiting preacher, Bernie Hegarty an ordinand, who will speak about vocations, and how that has worked out in her life.

Ultimately we could say that we actually only have one calling and that is to become fully human, which in Christian terms means becoming like Christ. May God bless you and help you in that most demanding yet fulfilling of all callings.

David

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay