A Misinterpreted Calling

Sometimes I think of God evaluating my life.  God looks at where I am, a Christian with assured justification trying to live as Christ would want me to live.  Then, God looks back on all the times I was given signs on where to go with my life and when God thinks about how I have misinterpreted all those signs, God slaps his forehead with a palm and laughs and laughs.

Perhaps Bishop Thomas Bickerton said it best when He described that he thought God wanted him to help people see better.  So he set his mind around accomplishing that goal and prepared to become an optometrist. He reflected that his calling was to help people see better, but it wasn't by putting a pair of glasses on them. 

As a young girl with extraordinary faith, a similar situation happened to me.  I know that Christ called me to help people live better more fulfilling lives.  I thought that the way to do that would be to become an occupational therapist, and through all that, I would fulfill my calling as a Christian.

Fortunately, occupational therapy did not work out.  With a little over one semester left to become an occupational therapist, several professors got together and decided that I did not have the clinical reasoning skills to be a successful occupational therapist.  They dismissed me from the master of occupational therapy program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. 

It was a really strange felling, I was so relieved not to have to worry about making the grade, acting just right, and not crying from the frustration of the program everyday. However, I was so sure that helping people to live a more fulfilling life by being an occupational therapist was what God was calling me to do. Then again, John Wesley thought his first trip to America was what God was calling him to do.  He returned to England considering himself a failure.

Right after the "dismissal", I knew I was going through something that Christ had planned for me, and that as unfortunate as the previous events had been, Christ had never let go of me, through that storm, and I could feel his hand holding me until the darkness cleared.  It was a few days later when I asked an old friend from Truman State University, how a person got a job with UMCOR.  Her response was to send me a link to the young adult mission and service programs through the General Board of Global Ministries. 

I kept that link, and the thought in the back of my mind as I pursued other job opportunities.  Finally just before the deadline, I applied.  That was one of the best choices I have ever made.Now I am headed to be a missionary, and I will spend these two years to growing in my faith, and discerning my calling, which will be in some manner clergy.  I realized this during the laity session at the Missouri Annual Conference, while trying to keep my mind on my district lay leader instead of the Confederations Cup soccer game that was on TV in the background, I felt the Holy Spirit speak to me saying that I shouldn’t be in a laity session when I was clergy material.

For the next two years I will be stationed at the University of California-Davis in Davis, California.  I will work as a United Methodist representative in a multi-faith community, with goals of increasing understanding among faiths, and to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. 

College ministry is an area that is important to me.  It is always heart-wrenching to hear a story about a child who hears the good news of Jesus Christ for the first time after having lived his whole life not knowing.  My story doesn’t involve an adorable little kid, in fact the main character in my story is a college aged girl, from a small town in Missouri. I was a junior in college, and she was a freshman.  She had started attending church when she came to college because it was something she had never done before.  Then one evening after a bible study she came to me, and said, “hey Cindy, do you know those lyrics in the song In Christ Alone, that say ‘there on the cross when Jesus died/ the wrath of God was satisfied” I replied that I did know those lyrics and then she asked the real question. “How did Jesus dying satisfy the wrath of God?”

I am confident that there are many other college students who have never heard the good news of Jesus Christ.  I intend to lessen the number of people who become adults never knowing the love of Jesus Christ.  I very much appreciate your prayers as I begin this mission.