The Quietness of the Call
It’s all about recognizing the call, a call that often comes to us in hushed tones or in the most ignominious of circumstances, and via the most unlikely of messengers. Have you had the call? For Neo it was a puzzling message on his computer—had any unusual emails lately? For Joseph it was ending up thrown into the bottom of a pit. Through these things the divine breaks through the thin film of surface tension separating us from eternity. He comes and journeys with us in disguise. The incarnation of God into a poor Middle Eastern family was not the only time God has tested us with ordinariness, with the things despised, the things of no account. Your call will not come to you any other way. Sure, some speaker might pick you out of the audience and tell you of your future greatness but the only test of whether what he says is true is, Did the Hidden God already tell me that?
John Kirkby was at a Christian leaders’ conference in Sussex. He was queuing for breakfast and soon found himself sat next to a man he had never met before. He shared with the man all that had been in his heart about starting a Christian building society or bank. The man told John Kirkby to ring Nigel. Nigel, apparently, was a venture capitalist and might be able to help. On 6 June 1996, John Kirkby made the phone call that would prove to be the most significant phone call of his entire life. The man, so it turned out, was neither a venture capitalist nor able to help with John’s plans. Nigel simply said, “Why don’t you see what you can do without needing anyone to help you start or any huge sum of money. What could you do on your own now?”
John relates the rest, “I went straight to my computer. . .I just typed debt counselling. That was it! I knew this was it. . .I had found something I was qualified and able do.”9
Today, Christians Against Poverty helps over 6,000 people every year to become debt free and is becoming one of the world’s leading non-profit debt relief agencies. But the beginning was very ordinary. It isn’t even as though Nigel said anything profound or deep. It was simply the trigger that John Kirkby needed.
For Mother Teresa, all it took was a single phrase from a Jesuit priest on furlough from India: “Each person, in life, has to follow his own road.”10 This one aphorism sparked in her mind the thought that she too could become a missionary and take a road that will lead far from all that had been so familiar and comfortable in her native Skopje.
St Francis (1181–1226), in obedience (or so he thought) to God’s call to “rebuild my church,” was busy repairing, in a literal sense, ruined chapels, when he came across a leper. He had, for some time felt great compassion for the poor and at this moment, felt a powerful urge to dismount from his horse and go to embrace the poor disfigured leper, so despised and alone. At that moment, the leper vanished out of sight. This became one of a number of decisive moments in the formation of St Francis’ call to rebuild the church in a spiritual sense, spurning possessions to reach the poor and the untouchable of society. St Francis believed that the anonymous leper had been an appearance of Christ in disguise.
On 24 May 1738, a rather stuffy, punctilious Oxford don known as Jacky to his family and friends had gone “very unwillingly” to a meeting for Christians of a fairly “enthusiastic” kind that he felt at once drawn to and repulsed by. They were mostly immigrants. The meeting took place in the home of one of these immigrants in a fairly insignificant part of London. He hadn’t long arrived when somebody took a book written by Martin Luther about Paul’s letter to the Romans. The man started reading artlessly, not from the main body of the text, but from the Preface. “Oh no,” Jacky must have thought, “What a bore. He’s probably going to read the index as well. I knew I shouldn’t have come.” Instead of “enthusiasm” being the main danger, sheer dullness was now becoming the major threat. To Jacky’s great surprise, something unexpected happened. I will let him tell the rest. . .
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.11
That man, as any Methodist will know, was John Wesley. Nothing could have prepared him for the amazing transformation of the British people that he was now going to be an agent of over the coming decades.
In all these moments, the extraordinary breaks into the ordinary. Film trailers often like to draw attention to this: “It was just like any other ordinary day. . .” says the deep, Don LaFontaine-esque voice, as tiny snippets of the hero’s pre-adventure life flash in front of us, “when suddenly. . .” Just enough ordinariness is portrayed for us to be able to switch off our incredulity when the extraordinary starts happening. And we need to do the same in real life. Be prepared for a moment in which the impossible is wrested from the teeth of the merely possible.
Jesus, as his custom was, stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth to read. It was just like any other ordinary day of observing the religious customs that he had been brought up with. He read from Isaiah. As soon as he opened his mouth people could sense something different: a freshness, an arresting authority, as though every word was him and he was every word. Then came the moment: “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” A religious ceremony that included a reading from a religious text was, all of a sudden, transformed into a “today” moment. “Right now, today,” Jesus said, “the Messiah that Isaiah spoke of is among you.” Indifference, normally so easy in a religious setting, became impossible now. Within minutes, the whole congregation tried to throw him off a cliff. Things could never be the same again. In this case, a whole congregation was receiving—and refusing—a call.
The Inciting Incident
The call, as you may have already noticed, does not always come in the shape of something positive. Paul Scanlon, the pastor of Abundant Life church in Bradford, once said, “without a complaint your vision will perish.” This is especially true for those who have received a call from God through witnessing some terrible need or inexcusable injustice. Your response is, “I cannot and will not sit back and let this kind of thing carry on!” It is a complaint that quietly rages within you and keeps you focused on providing that answer even against overwhelming odds.
Elizabeth Fry has now become the face on the back of the Bank of England’s Five Pound Note. Known as the “angel of prisons,” her first visit to Newgate Prison in February 1813 would change her life forever. Philanthropist Stephen Grellet had visited the men’s section and was badly shaken by the squalor he had witnessed but still worse had been the glimpse afforded him of the conditions under which the three hundred women lived, together with their children and new born babies, in two cells and two wards for the mothers with babies. Elizabeth Fry lived not far away and was urged to pay a visit. She did so with a friend, Anna Buxton, and some baby clothes. The smell as she approached the cells was the first thing to hit her: she and Anna began to wretch as the stench of urine, stale sweat, blood, excrement, vomit, alcohol and rotting food assaulted them in the lamp-lit corridor. Next was the growing noise as they approached of crying, wailing, laughing and shouting. Worst of all was the sight of half-naked women who stared into Elizabeth’s face with hopeless eyes and with lice crawling in their eye-brows, hair and clothes. She went upstairs to the wards and clothed and cuddled the freezing cold babies and spoke comfortingly to their mothers. Back down in the cell, she and Anna, both devout Quakers, knelt down on the filthy straw. Some of the women knelt around them. Tears flowed as she began to commit the lives of these poor women and their ragged children to God’s care, probably the first time anyone had ever bothered to pray for them. Thus began her great life’s work. Through trials of her own she worked relentlessly to improve the conditions in Britain’s prisons.12
Take William Wilberforce. His progress from fashionable parliamentary socialite to slave trade abolitionist was, at first, a gradual one. Steadily, he had,