What Is My Calling?

What is my calling? As a retired person with disabilities, I wonder what I have to offer?  I pray, I seek answers, I listen. But I haven’t found something that feels like a calling yet. 

Sometimes, I think it might be writing. I even started this blog. I feel a bit foolish about it. I love to talk to people about God, to dialogue about faith. But, now, when I write pages for the blog, it feels like hubris. It’s not a dialogue anymore. It’s no longer a dialogue with God. It’s no longer a dialogue with others. Even when I move words that I wrote as prayer almost word for word to the blog, something changes.

Do I feel unworthy to write about God? Is that it? Perhaps. So, how do I share God, if I feel unworthy to be public about my growing relationship with God?

And how can I possibly be looking for a calling? If I stay backstage, or in the balcony, is that where my calling is? Should it be out of sight and unnoticed? Perhaps.

I wait, I pray, I keep writing privately. I am uncertain how to proceed. I ask God what to do, to show me. I ask others I trust.  I am not naturally patient. The waiting is hard. I remind myself that this is Lent, a time to go to the desert and pray. 

Last year, spending Lent in a new place, in a pandemic, I found faith renewal, strength in prayer, and support from the priest I spoke with during the process of returning to Catholicism. 

Those supports continue. I also work with a spiritual director, and so many faith opportunities have grown online. And while I’ve largely stayed at home, I’ve joined online writing groups over the last year as well and made several friends within those groups. 

Some of us have held online writing sprints via Facebook chat. It no longer surprises me that these quickly become focused on prayer, or that I discover these friends are ministers, chaplains, catechists, missionaries, and rabbinical scholars.

Today I told a chaplain friend about the Mission time at church over the last few days. I repeated a story the guest presenter told about sitting on a curb years ago with a teenager who had just found out her mother had died. He sat there with her while she waited for her ride. And he talked about how he didn’t do anything, God did. Then, he mentioned feedback twenty years later that he should stop saying he didn’t do anything, because he did, he heeded God’s nudging to sit with that girl.

Later I told my friend that I am searching for my retirement calling. Her response reset my thinking. She said “I don’t think of a ‘big’ calling. It’s about what that Mission speaker said, heeding God’s nudging.” And that for her that also means “It’s about doing the next thing that I can’t do without God’s help.”

After so many years away from Catholicism, my mind has been telling me that I need to do something big for God to make up for those years. No wonder my approach hasn’t felt right, that’s me talking, my ego, my pride.

God has sent me two messengers this week. One to tell me to pay attention to his nudges rather than my own inclinations, and the other to remind me that I need to rely on his help. Amen.