The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

by Os Guinness

Our life-purpose therefore comes from two sources at once—who we are created to be and who we are called to be.

Kierkegaard wrote in his Journal: “The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”

The trouble is that, as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for.

Some feel they have time but not enough money; others feel they have money but not enough time. But for most of us, in the midst of material plenty, we have spiritual poverty.

calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.

God alone needs nothing outside himself, because he himself is the highest and the only lasting good. So all objects we desire short of God are as finite and incomplete as we ourselves are and, therefore, disappointing if we make them the objects of ultimate desire.

They don’t explain what to each of us is the heart of our yearning—to know why we are each unique, utterly exceptional, and therefore significant as human beings.

Many of the categories people offer to explain or heal us today are too general. In the case of my hallway acquaintance, the categories were also entirely negative.

According to Nietzche, we have only two choices—obey ourselves or be commanded—which leaves no choice to the heroes who wish to climb beyond the level of the herd to the highest mountains.

Such self-construction is ceaseless and expensive. And, as the passion for public hygiene and safety, and the virulence of antismoking campaigns show, even politics becomes a form of body care by other means.

The Caller sees and addresses us as individuals— as unique, exceptional, precious, significant, and free to respond. He who calls us is personal as well as infinite and personal in himself, not just to us. So we who are called are addressed as individuals and invited into a relationship (“I have called you by name,” God said).

Responding to the call requires courage, but we are not purely on our own.

Responding to the call means rising to the challenge, but in conversation and in partnership—and in an intimate relationship between the called and the Caller.