Sooner or later our lives will be over. The day will come when we will reach the last minute of the last day on the last page of the calendar of our lives. Sooner or later we will all have that single day when ‘tomorrow’ won’t be standing at the ready to become the next ‘today.’ Our days have always been marked by the promise of another day to the point that we have assumed a ‘forever’ inventory of other days. Yet, the seemingly bottomless inventory from which we have repeatedly drawn our days will one day be expended, and what we have never faced we will now face. Sooner or later our lives will be over.
At that point, the daily obligations and challenges that defined our lives will come to an abrupt end. All of the assorted tasks, the innumerable problems, the incessant obstacles, the various celebrations, the breaking and making of relationships, the paying down of mortgages, the paying out of compliments, and all of the things that consumed both our thoughts and our time will be forevermore concluded.
And in the conclusion, what is going to be left other than all of these things that are now concluded? We’ve checked off the proverbial boxes on the endless pages that now lay as thick reams at our feet, and we’ve suddenly checked off the last box behind which there is now nothing other than the startling void of empty space. And now, what’s left?
If all that’s left is an endless litany of tasks accomplished and problems overcome, then the tally of our lives is the tally of what we got done. Life had become consumed in the living of life. It had become an existence focused on the prescribed tasks that we took as living, versus a calling that we seize as changing living. Life too often becomes parched, rote and stale as if the sum total of the goal is simply getting through life, rather than the far greater goal of irreversibly transforming life as the singular goal of the journey itself.
A Calling
Do we live to check off the relentless list of incessant obligations that life spawns? And if this cycle is the sum total of our existence, is it simply existence? And if it is simply existence, have we completely confused authentically robust living with something more akin to a robotic existence?
The demands of life both gently lull and aggressively coerce us into some sort of nauseatingly methodical regime that becomes the cadence to which we live our lives. Mesmerized into some catatonic state by pandemic routine, we lose a vision for anything else other than routine. In fact, we may see life as being nothing else. And in it all an exhilarating sense of calling is lost.
A calling calls us to charge the world rather than solely walk in lock-step with it. It is a declared rebellion of sorts where we purposefully engage life’s routine with the unforgiving intent to wildly transform the routine. It is the clarion call to embrace good things in order to make them better things, to believe that wherever we are is not even remotely close to where we could be and should be.
A calling is a brilliant and entirely undimmed vision that engages this existence of ours, but in the engagement it staunchly refutes the stale mundaneness of survival, and outright rejects surrender to the blandness of rote living. It loudly declares that there is infinitely more to all of this and that we have been ordained to usher that ‘more’ into our own existence, as well as unashamedly infuse that ‘more’ into the existence of others. Sooner or later our lives will be over. And rather than a checklist of assorted accomplishments that lays as thick reams at my feet, I would much rather have a tally of how radically different life is because I robustly lived out my calling and changed life. That is a calling.
April 12, 2015
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC