Because God doesn't leave voicemail

    I heard someone tell this story once about being at a Quaker prayer meeting: A group of Quakers was meeting at a YMCA gym. It’s typical for Quaker prayer meetings to have long stretches of silence, broken only by someone inspired to offer a word or prayer.  During one long stretch of silence, a phone began to ring inside a nearby office.  The phone rang and rang unanswered by neither person nor machine. After nearly a minute of ringing, it finally stopped. No one said anything. A few seconds later, it happened again. After nearly a minute of unheeded ringing, the phone and the room fell silent again. A few more minutes of silence followed, until someone, seemingly prompted to reflection by the ringing phone, asked of no one in particular, “How do you know when it is God calling?” The questioner received only more silence in response from his fellow prayers. Then, out of the silence, came his reply: “When it’s God calling, the ringing never stops.”
    It would be nice if we got calls from God on our cellphones, calling with clear instructions for what we should do in life.  That would make things so much more efficient and effective, wouldn’t it? Instead, we live with a persistent restlessness, wondering if we are following “God’s plan” for our life.  But it would be a mistake to presume that when God calls, the call is to a place way outside of our everyday reality.  In other words, God’s call most often consists of the unique "ingredients" of our life: our talents, our passions,our relationships, our dreams.  College is often the place where the "ingredients" of our life take shape. So much of what we encounter in the normal course of life at SMU contributes to our emerging dreams for the future: deciding on majors, studying abroad, meeting people with diverse experiences, encountering new ideas in and out of the classroom. But how can we know if what is coming together as dreams for our life sync up with what God is calling us to rather than just being a set of self-serving goals? 
    Since God isn’t leaving us voicemail, we need a way of testing the dreams we’ve come up with so far.  Ask yourself these five questions (adapted from Mary Manin Morissey) :

1)    Does this dream give me life? Does it enliven me?
2)    Does this dream align with my values and beliefs?
3)    Do I need help from God and others to make this dream come true?
4)    Will this dream challenge me to grow into more of my true self?
5)    Will this dream ultimately serve others?

    The place where God calls you to, Frederick Buechner once wrote, “is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  Working toward a definitive “Yes” for each question will guide us with confidence to the place God is calling us. This kind of testing of God’s call takes time to reflect, contemplate and think critically about our experiences, so be patient with yourself. But when God does call, you won’t need to check the caller ID to be sure.