Announcing Calling Stories & Calling Conversations!
In the past two autumns, I’ve hosted a series of guest posts called Work Stories. This year I've reimagined the series to embrace a wider vision of calling and to add some sweet bonus features for you. Keep reading for all the details!
If the historic liturgical calendar that allows six months for Ordinary Time teaches us to number our days to gain a heart of wisdom, there must be a lot of wisdom to be gained in our regular, working, resting, and worshipping lives. This is the model Christ seemed to have lived, and the church invites us to embrace the same pathway.
One way I do this is to consider the parts of Christ’s life that Scriptures tell us almost nothing about. Between his newborn and toddler days which were spent in various locations of the earth, as his parents sought refuge from Herod to the beginning of his more formal ministry marked by his baptism in the Jordan River we know only a few sparse details. You could say this was the Ordinary Time of Christ’s life. The years we can patch together a few details of work and worship made up the vast majority of his days on earth.
A Missional Invitation
In the words of theology professor Wendy Wright, Ordinary Time is a season:
“…to become attentive to the call of discipleship both outer and inner. What are we called to do? … What are we called to be?”
There may not be another area of our lives that we hold most in common without realizing it, and we spend our days trying to fill the gap between what we were made to do and what we actually do with our days. This gap is no small thing; it often feels like an ache we can’t name and leaks out in the midst of our day jobs and our too-short weekends. We carry this sense of wanting something more with us into every relationship and every job interview. We know, in our innermost being, we were made for something good and most of us are not sure how much attention to pay to that feeling.
In the meantime, we have to pay the bills, care for our families, mow the lawn, and figure out what to eat for lunch.
Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I belong?
In between the lines of the thousands of posts I’ve logged into this blog you can hear these questions and this ache in Brian and me. If nothing else, nearly twenty-nine years of our marriage has been trying to help each other figure out what we’re going to do when we grow up.
As a part of the inaugural Work Stories series, I wrote 3 stream-of-consciousness reflections on our journey:
The Series Reimagined
In the last two years, I zeroed in on our work lives which is one facet of the way our callings intersect with our daily lives,. What we do to support our living matters in the economy of God’s kingdom, whether we’re working the job of our dreams or something we dream about quitting as soon as a better option arrives. Like any other commitment we make, our jobs teach us so much about who we are, why we’re here, and where we belong.
In my own crazy quilt of work selves, I’ve found answers to these essentially human questions more in the negative space between what is and what I long for it to be. Maybe you’ve experienced the same?
As the guest contributors in 2018 and 2019 shared their hearts for the daily lives of working at paid jobs, volunteer gigs, or passion projects, I noticed that this undercurrent of callings propels their stories more than any other reality.
In this short video clip about discerning God’s calling, spiritual director and teacher Jennifer Haworth shares a wonderful analogy based on the Mississippi River:
“If you’ve ever had a chance to visit the Mississippi River, it’s a really big moving body of water. On the surface you’ll see all sorts of cross-currents moving every which way, but deep down in that river there is a current and it keeps the river moving down into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s that current that keeps that river alive.”
Haworth explains that the cross-currents in the Mississippi are like the doubts, fears, anxieties, and disappointments that plague us as we consider questions about what we were made to do and who we were made to be. These cross-currents compete for our attention and cloud our ability to discern thankfully the invitations God is calling out to us. We easily lose our ability to listen clearly and begin to feel paralyzed about which direction to take.
The spiritual practice of discernment allows us to pause in the middle of all the pell-mell crosscurrents in order to notice and to listen to the true undercurrent moving our lives forward. Haworth offers a couple of questions for our discernment “What is my own life saying to me? What feels true and what feels illusory or false?” She suggests that when we listen, we’ll learn that “the deepest desires we have for ourselves are really the deepest desires God has for us, provided that we’re moving in a direction that brings forth love and life.”
Discernment allows us to be present to the invitations God is offering us right now,. As we practice this holy kind of listening within our own hearts and our trusted community we become more responsive to the undercurrent propelling our lives through this earth to our ultimate glory when we’ll know and see with complete clarity and joy.
Even for those practiced in discernment, has it ever been harder to listen to our lives? Have the cross-currents surrounding our 2020 lives ever felt more turbulent and soul-sucking?
As I prayed about what the series will look like in 2020, I felt drawn to expand the series in 3 ways during this pandemic year.
Acknowledge more clearly that, while our work matters, our jobs are only a part of the larger calling(s) God invites us into at different times.
Acknowledge that our callings and our work have been impacted deeply by all the events in our larger world and our personal lives in 2020.
Offer a bonus gift to my Patreon community which I began just after the Work Stories series last year.
I thought it might be helpful to revisit the guests from the past two years for a follow-up on their own sense of calling in this season. I’m looking forward to sharing their reflections with you in the coming weeks and grateful to them for their generous hospitality to share their own unfolding stories with us.
I’ve also invited each guest contributor to join my Patreon community in a Zoom conversation to share more about what they’re learning about work and calling in the midst of 2020 and to give us space to ask them a few questions.
Calling Conversations on Patreon
Calling Conversations on Patreon will combine time for contemplation and conversation with our guest post contributors. I’ll guide us through some simple, quiet exercises for listening to our lives and discerning God’s invitations. Then we’ll spend time in conversation with our special guests, with time to ask questions and learn from what they’re discovering in their own lives.
Two steps to enjoy the series and to reserve your space for the bonus Calling Conversations:
(If you're already a patron, skip straight to Step 2!)
1. If you aren't already a subscriber at my blog, you can sign up in the sidebar here to receive posts in your email inbox.
2. Reserve your spot to join our one or more of our Calling Conversations by emailing me: tamara@tamarahillmurphy.com Let me know which date(s) you plan to join us.
I've set up three dates so folks can select which date(s) work best for them:
Sunday, October 25, 2:30-4pm Eastern {New time update!}
Monday, October 26, 7-9 pm Eastern
Tuesday, October 27, 12:30 - 2 pm Eastern
My hope is to facilitate times together that combine contemplation, conversation, and a greater sense of the callings we've each been given.
I look forward to hearing from you!
With anticipation,
Tamara
p.s. here are the guest posts from the past 2 years: