Being a High School Guidance Counsellor would likely be
a rewarding job. Helping young people
identify their giftedness and strengths and even their weaknesses and then assisting
them to sort out a direction for their future, these seem like satisfying and
worthwhile tasks. Guidance Counselling,
or Student Success as its now called, involves dealing with the question of
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I have to think that this question is harder
to answer now than it was twenty years.
There’s a wealth of opportunity today due to the Internet and technology
that we old fogies can’t begin to imagine.
Yet, finding people willing to work necessary trades is difficult;
things like wiring homes, welding, plumbing and heating, or even butchering a
cow – things we call skilled labour. These
are the days of the Internet but the Internet has only made it so that people
can quickly know a lot of information but at the end of the day not really know
how to do anything. It’s the difference
between using a calculator and actually knowing multiplication tables. On top of it all social media with its
addictive false sense of relationship has distracted our young people from being
able to focus on anything that entails purpose and has rather ingeniously
robbed them of the privilege of being alone with their thoughts.
A particular problem that people in the Guidance
profession have these days is they are trying to help young people figure out
what to do with their lives when these young people have been well groomed to
have no sense of a higher purpose in life than themselves. We have encultured our young people to be “me
centered” and it is proving to be self-destructive to them as individuals and to
us as a society. Guidance counsellors
tend to ask questions like “What do you feel you’re skilled at?” “What interests you?” “What are your goals in life?” Rarely, does the question come up of “Do you
feel there is a higher purpose in life that you could devote yourself too?” and
certainly not the question, “What do you sense God wants you to do with your
life?”
Just taking a moment for a humorous aside, image what
it would be like to be a guidance counsellor to the prophet Jeremiah. (Jeremiah
was just a teenager when God called him.)
Counsellor: “Jeremiah, what do you want to do with your life?” Jeremiah:
“God is calling me to be his prophet to the nations?” Counsellor: “Hmm. I see. How did you come to this conclusion?” Jeremiah: “Well, my Dad’s a priest and I’ve
always thought I’d be carrying on the family tradition, but then out of the
blue God spoke to me and said he knew me before I was born and being a prophet
is what he’s crafted me for and appointed me to.” Counsellor: “God spoke to you? I mean like you heard his voice?” Jeremiah: “Yeah. He said he was going to put his words into to
my mouth and what I will say will be for the tearing down and building up of
the nations.” Counsellor: “How do you
think that’s going to work for you, Jeremiah?”
Jeremiah: “Well, it won’t be an easy row to hoe. God said not to be afraid and that he would
be with me to deliver me. I assume that
means trouble ahead.” Counsellor:
“Jeremiah, maybe we should go talk to the school psychologist. This is a little above my pay grade.”
Speaking frankly, people in the public education
system would not know what to do with a young person who said they felt like
God was calling them to something. In
the church, I’m not sure we would do much better. Back in the 90’s Frederick Buechner
(pronounced Beekner), a popular Christian writer and a Presbyterian minister to
boot, did some writing in the area of how to determine what God is calling you
to do and his thoughts took the pastoral world by storm. He concluded that our calling is that place
where our greatest passion and the world’s greatest need meet up. That sounds wonderful to ears well steeped in
narcissism, bit in truth it’s really just an altruistic version of “Follow your
heart.”
Moreover, Buechner’s definition of calling is just a
ramped up Christian invitation to entrepreneurship and it only works if you are
a person of privilege. It works like
this. One can see the need for humanity to be more environmentally
responsible. One could be a passionate
cyclist and posses the knowledge of how to fix a bike. One could determine that God is calling you
to open a bike shop somewhere in the GTA that specializes in commuter biking
and bike sharing. One discovers that the
start-up cost of such a venture of passion is between 500k and one million
dollars. Better find some sugar, honey…or,
get a normal job, promote cycling to your neighbours, and fix their bikes for
free.
So, anyway determining what God has called us to…it’s
not that difficult. God has summonsed us
all to follow Jesus, to be his disciples with the end result that we grow more
and more in Christlikeness. This will
involve Christian community, prayer, Bible Study, proactive and indeed
prophetic engagement with our neighbours, neighbourhoods, and communities. What happens along the way is that we will
discover new talents and new passions and we will find ourselves being invited
to do things inside the church and out in our neighbourhoods and surrounding
communities, things which God has set aside for us to do. There will be times, rare times, when we have
Jeremiah moments and God speaks directly to us about a specific task. Most of the time, we will just be keeping on
at keeping on. But over time we will
find that along the way what we find ourselves doing now for the Lord is what
he has carefully crafted us for all along the way. That’s seems how calling works.
You may by now be asking why I am wasting my breath
talking to you folks about calling when nearly all of you are well into
retirement. Yeah well, we are never too old
to continue to respond to the call to grow in Christlikeness; so the subject is
relevant. But to speak more specifically
to the elder generation about calling, Psalm 71 was likely written by someone
up in years. A close reading of it
leaves one wondering whether its author might actually have been Jeremiah
himself. It certainly fits the bill of
someone who has lived a faithful life and was persecuted for their faithfulness
and yet along the way discovered just how faithful and present God is. Through thick and thin God was there working
things to the best of the Psalmist before the eyes of his adversaries.
The greatest asset of most North American churches,
ours included, is our wealth in Seniors who like the Psalmist know just how
faithful and steadfastly loving God is; who know that God does indeed answer
prayer, does indeed heal, does indeed deliver his beloved children from harm,
and when we have deserved condemnation God has always found a way to bring
about forgiveness and strengthen our relationships. Looking at the Psalm, it seems the Psalmist
is making the argument that God has carefully crafted him so that in old age he
is able to praise God for God’s faithfulness, to proclaim God’s mighty deeds to
the next generation, and to be a witness to there being reason to hope. The elder church, that’s you folks, knows
God’s faithfulness better than anybody.
That being said, it may be that God is calling you to be more vocal
about your faith and God’s faithfulness than you presently are.
We’ve a culture that deeply hungers to be
“Touched by an Angel”. Though you may
not be a young red-head who speaks with an Irish accent, God has carefully
crafted you to be that angel of hope. To
your amazement, you will often find that God even gives you the words to
say. Praise God, proclaim his goodness,
and give people hope. This is our
calling. Amen.
