For as long as I can remember in this journey that stretches back to high school, I have struggled to understand “call.” For the most part, I’ve heard it described as a one-time event.
Abraham heard from God while looking up into the night sky. Moses had the burning bush. David experienced Samuel’s anointing. The disciples received invitations from Jesus himself. Paul was knocked off of his horse. Each had a one-time encounter that set him on a life path, or so it seems.
I’ve met pastors who also talk like that. A miraculous event occurred in college; a family member set them on the path when they were very young; a summer camp or mission trip experience impacted them.
I must confess, I’m jealous.
My winding road
My experience is different.
I typically describe my call as circuitous, which is a nice way of saying “all over the place.” I served five years as a pastor before becoming a youth minister. Later, family ministries was added to my title. Then, when I formed a band and launched a contemporary worship service (back when that was a thing), we tacked on “worship ministry.” Now I am a writer for our denominational website and increasingly an interviewer and podcaster. Circuitous.
For me, call has been about the next ministry opportunity: a door opening over there, a need in the church, a skill developed over time and finding a place to use it.
For example, I learned guitar from a member of the first church I pastored. In the second church, I wrote devotions as bulletin filler for the contemporary worship service. In the third, I started managing webpages and posting podcasts — skills I now use nearly every day.
Every step led me to the next, but in those early days of feeling called, I would have never expected to end up here.
Not boring
I wanted a clear path, but in hindsight, that would have been boring.
What about you and your journey with God? Has it been a straight line or roller coaster? Interstate or scenic route? What does “call” mean to you?
Tell me about your call in the comments below!
It’s like I subconsciously knew the call was there, but have no exact moment to pinpoint as a realization. Just a slow revelation.
I, too, have marveled at how one path has led to the next, going from radio to community relations to copy writing to youth ministry to web ministry. It’s amazing how each path has widened into the next.
The MBTI is based on the influential theory of psychological types proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1921, which was partially based on the four elements of classical cosmology.
Jung speculated that people experience the world using four principal psychological functions—sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking—and that one of these four functions is dominant in an individual, a majority of the time. In MBTI theory, the four categories are introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. According to the MBTI, each person is said to have one preferred quality from each category, producing 16 unique types.
The MBTI emphasizes the value of naturally occurring differences. “The underlying assumption of the MBTI is that we all have specific preferences in the way we construe our experiences, and these preferences underpin our interests, needs, values, and motivation.”
The MBTI Manual states that the indicator “is designed to implement a theory; therefore, the theory must be understood to understand the MBTI”. Fundamental to the MBTI is the hypothesis of psychological types as originally developed by Carl Jung. Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:
The “rational” (judging) functions: thinking and feeling.
The “irrational” (perceiving) functions: sensation and intuition.
Jung believed that for every person, each of the functions is expressed primarily in either an introverted or extraverted form.
Based on Jung’s original concepts, Briggs and Myers developed their own theory of psychological type, described below, on which the MBTI is based. According to psychologist Hans Eysenck writing in 1995 the 16 personality types used in MBTI are incomplete, as Jung’s theory used 32 types, 16 of which could not be measured by questionnaire. Per Eysenck, it was unfair to Jung to claim the scale accurately measured Jungian concepts. Both Jung’s original model and the simplified MBTI remain hypothetical, with no controlled scientific studies supporting either.
https://mbtitest.tilda.ws/