20 Aug What Is The Vocation To Which I Am Being Called And What Does Vocational Fidelity (faithfully) Look Like For Me? 

Essence: Who I am in the Lord  

My name is Tait, and I am known and loved by Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. And that is enough for me. 

In the last six months, I have personally focused on what it means to be in and belong to Christ using Ephesians one and two. It has become something that I read often, something that grounds me in my relationship with Jesus.

Christ blessed me in the heavenly realms (1:3). He Chose me before the creation of the world (1:4), Predestined me for adoption (1:5), and redeemed me through his blood (1:7). I am alive in Christ (2:5). I am saved by graced (2:8). I am God’s handiwork (2:10). I am brought near by the blood of Jesus Christ (2:13). Jesus is my peace (2:14). I am a member of his household (2:19).

I have known how much Jesus loves me for many years, but for some reason, the Spirit is using this passage in Ephesians currently to show me how much he loves me and to encourage and strengthen me for the next phase of my journey.

Essence is who God created me to be. God created me in his image (Genesis 1:27) and designed me to be in relationship with him. I believe this, and I am the type of person who believes what the Word of God says. If, as a person who lives with a disability, I believed what the world says about me, I would be lost and would not be able to get up in the morning. I chose to believe what the Lord says. I always have.

God defines my life, not what I do. My disability forces me to see the world as it is, not as I want it to be. Exodus 4:11, Psalm 139, and Jeremiah 1 are a few guideposts I use to help me remember who I am in the Lord.

Exodus 4:11 tells me that the Lord made my body and designed my speech. He teaches me what to say. Psalm 139 tells me that the Lord formed me in my mother’s womb and that he knew me before I was born. I am wonderfully and fearfully made, especially when I have a disability. 

Jeremiah echoes Psalm 139 very closely, adding a mission from the Lord. It might go over the line and begin to define my work, but it actually helps me with balance. Jeremiah also begins to define the time I was born and how I am to understand the times in which God placed me. He says to build lives where he has placed you and grow (Jeremiah 29:5, my words).

For Such a Time as This 

This is especially meaningful to me because I believe I was born for a moment such as this (Esther 4:14).  “We are conceived at a particular time and born into a specific communal setting. This social and historical situatedness of the human condition is acknowledged and represented by the sociohistorical dimension.” (Letterman, Muto, p. 27)

I was born at the right time to fulfill the mission God laid out for me. I understand the type of disability I have would have left me bedridden in any other era in history. I would have died young. However, I was fortunate to come of age before technology really took over. I learned to type on a typewriter and the card catalog was my first Google, yet I finally have access to the world at my fingertips. This has made it much easier for me to do the work I am called to. I genuinely believe the Lord has seen to it that I have had the best of both worlds. For this, I am genuinely grateful.

My Calling

I am a writer. 

I remember writing a story for my eighth-grade English class and feeling really good about it. Received a good grade. I went home and asked my mother if she thought I was meant to be a writer. “You could be,” she told me. “Only the Lord knows for sure, but I guarantee that if you trust him, he will never lead you astray.”

I cannot say that from that moment, I knew God wanted me to be a writer, but I can say that Mom’s words turned out to be prophetic. I have not always been aware of the Lord guiding my writing career, but I have never wavered from learning the craft. 

The thing about being a writer is that you can never be in a hurry. Or at least I can’t. Writing is a Mary business. It’s sitting at the Lord’s feet and listening. My tenth-grade English teacher said this about my writing: “It’s a thrill to see (Tait’s) skills develop. It almost brings me to tears to see what he can do with words. When he writes, it’s a fantastic expression of what he thinks. He understands words so well, and it’s as if the angel inside of him is helping get them out.”

For many years, I wondered how this mystery works. Father van Kamm has given me a language to understand it. He says that the highest level of human spirituality is the Pneumatic/Ecclesial—our capacity to hear and obey the Holy Spirit. I’m still trying to understand van Kaam’s work, but this has given me a vocabulary for my writing experience. I have learned to become an instrument and write down what the Lord says to me.

I honestly don’t know if I want to know this. I almost prefer to have some mystery, to be able to linger in the unknown. But then I begin to understand that the Lord is unveiling his purposes, and maybe this is just another step in my sanctification. I follow where the Lord leads.

In his book, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson says writing is an act of prayer. He goes on to say:

Heuristic writing—writing to explore and discover what I didn’t know. Writing as a way of entering into language and letting language enter me, words connecting with words and creating what had previously been inarticulate or unnoticed or hidden. Writing as a way of paying attention. Writing as an act of prayer. (Peterson, 239)

This is me. I must write. Like Peterson, I must write to explore myself and my thoughts. I enter the world he talks about, and it’s holy.  It’s just the Lord and me there. I have written prayers to the Lord in that place. I have even used a journaling technique for years where I let the Father type through my hands. It’s how we communicate. I’ll go back and read something, and it opens my eyes to what is happening in not only my life but the lives of others. 

Write What You See

It gets better. I didn’t have to get much beyond the chapter’s title to be inspired. Simply put, Peterson quotes John in Revelation 1:11: “Write what you see.” 

Of course! Why didn’t I see it before? All I have to do is open my iPad and write what I see. My job as a writer is to listen to the Lord, to pay attention to what is happening around me, and write what the Spirit has to say to me and my community. It sounds straightforward, but it isn’t easy to carry out in practice. 

One of the verses about writing I am well familiar with is Habakkuk 2:2: 

Write the vision;

make it plain on tablets, 

So he may run who reads it.

It’s a verse I always see on a writer’s website and something I have honestly started to overlook, almost taken advantage of. This time, however, I want to see this verse with clear eyes. I write the vision the Lord has given me and make it clear in blogs and articles so readers can catch and sense the living God’s active presence in and through my words.

When I looked up this verse, I noticed verse one:

I will take my stand at my watchpost

and station myself on the tower,

and look out to see what he will say to me,

and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

I lost my breath when I read those words. The Lord told me many years ago that I am to be a watchman. He wanted me to watch what was happening in the world while I was honing my writing skills and learn how to be his disciple. Peterson confirms this when he writes, “I realized that the largest part of language has to do with listening, not speaking—and certainly not ‘typing’.” (Peterson p. 239) Watching. Listening. The two are different senses, but they function similarly.

Peterson goes on to write:

Writer and Pastor were two sides of a single identity for John. It was not as if he added writer onto his vocation as pastor or pastor onto his vocation as writer. Pastor was not his “day job” and writer, the work for which he is best known in the church today, his real job. Nor was pastor his real job, the work for which he was best known in his own seven churches, and writer a mere moonlighting diversion. Writer and pastor are the same thing for John. It was in the badlands that I realized this about John—pastor and writer. Right foot, left foot: pastor, writer. (Peterson, page 237)

Amen! This is how I see my writing ministry.

I might substitute “pastor” for another word. Disability advocate, maybe. It’s my official job title, Ministry Advocate, after all. Prophet is another word that comes to mind. I must be careful with this word and not toss it around too often (prophets get killed!), but just like Habakkuk, I write purposefully. I write because I have something to say, and the Lord has something to say through me.

No matter how I phrase it, I can relate to John and Eugene Peterson: writing is at the core of who I am. I have to write. It is the vehicle that the Lord uses through me to communicate a message to the world.  I’d also add here (and I think John and Eugene would agree) that I can’t forget who I am in Christ – my essence – as I write. If I write for the Lord, I had better do it out of the place of knowing that I am a child of God, redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:7).

Turning to In the Name of Jesus, Henri Nouwen reminds me of Jesus’s words to Peter in John 21. Even as a writer, and maybe because I am a writer, I am to care for his sheep. Nouwen writes,

“As Jesus ministers, so he wants us to minister. He wants Peter to feed “his sheep and care for them, not as “professionals” who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved… It is Jesus who heals, not I; Jesus who speaks words of truth, not I; Jesus who is Lord, not I.”

My words can heal or they can injure. Jesus reminds me through Nouwen’s words that I am responsible for feeding the sheep. I write to minister to a broken world.

Conclusion

I recently completed a different type of writing project. I wrote what one might call my vision statement for the next phase of my ministry. I will be writing more about this in future blog posts. It has goals, stats, and outlines a way forward in ministry. The Lord was just as involved in it as he was with this paper. But that paper was the business side of my ministry. This paper showed me the spiritual side of the same coin. 

Both projects have been helpful as I look forward to the future. One gave me the vision and the practical steps I need to take to move forward, while this one has given me the spiritual insight I will need as I carry out those steps. I discovered the essence of who I am as a writer and a disciple of Jesus Christ. I was reminded that I was created by a God who loves me, that I was born “for a time such as this,” and that I am a writer. 

As I move forward, I need to tie the two together like a neatly wrapped gift. My mentor always reminds me that I am in seminary to learn skills to strengthen my writing and the message God wants me to share.

And I cannot forget the practical words from Adrian van Kam: “The Mary in us has to rest at the feet of Jesus if the Martha in us is to do her work.” There is some work for my Martha to do, but I am Mary at the core. My disability almost requires me to be Mary — to sit at Jesus’s feet and write from a place of rest and contemplation.

That is something I can and am proud to do for Jesus.