when I’m calling you oo oo oo oo oo oo

“If you can be happy doing anything else, do it!”

Those were the encouraging words of my Minister when I spent some time talking with him as a teenager who was exploring the possibility that God wanted me to be a Minister too. He was trying to express to me how it is crucial to know the certainty of your calling. If there was anything else with which I would have been content then that would suggest that I was not called.

I tried not to laugh when he said that. Not because it was silly, but because as he had been talking I had a thought that frightened me. “What will I do with my life if he says he does not think I am called to be a Minister?” As I zoned back in to what he was saying he uttered the sentence above. Great timing! God timing?

There have been other occasions when someone has said something at ‘just the right time’. Around the time when I was first considering a call to the Ministry (before the above conversation) I was in a Bible Study meeting and (unusually for me) only said one thing all evening, which was to read a passage from the Bible that I had been asked to read. It was my first time with this group. I was sat next to a friend on one side and an old lady called Ivy on the other. At the end of the evening Ivy turned to me and said (out of the blue), “You’re going to be a Minister, aren’t you?”

I was gobsmacked, and suspicious. How did she know that this is what I was wrestling with? I asked her how she knew and she smiled sweetly and enigmatically said, “I just know.”

That incident has stayed with me. It is something so ‘out of the ordinary’ that I believe that it was God speaking to me through Ivy. It is an incident that God reminds me of occasionally when I may feel low or the strengths of my sense of call has waned a bit. It is also something that reminds me that God speaks through all of us. There have been occasions when I have felt a strong sense that I should say something specific to someone and have usually offered it to them very cautiously and tentatively asked them if it makes sense. It almost always does.

That’s not because I am superspiritual or special, but because God is gracious enough to speak through me to others.

So when you sense that God wants you to speak with someone (and you WILL know) – go for it. Humility is better than “Thus saith the Lord” and gentleness is better than dogmaticism. But God may want to bless / encourage / inspire / help someone through you. Be brave.

Bernard, who is noted for his gracious manners, was awakened one morning at four forty four a.m. by his ringing telephone…

“Your dog’s barking, and it’s keeping me awake,” said an angry voice.

Bernard thanked the caller and politely asked his name and number before hanging up. 

The next morning at precisely four forty four a.m., Bernard called his neighbour back. 

“Good morning, Mr. Williams…. Just called to say that I don’t have a dog.”