A good friend and I had a conversation last night about "calling"... determining God's calling in our lives. He had just attended a conference focused on the subject, and the speaker had given the audience two questions: what has God revealed to you of himself through prayer recently? and how does that impact your sense of calling? Implicit in those questions is the statement that we learn our calling through habitual prayer which leads us to know God. Both my friend and I balked at this a little; I'm a studier, reader, formula-follower, thinker. I'm not so good at giving up the control and humbly subjecting myself to the process of God revealing himself on his time.
This morning I was reading from Devotional Classics (a compilation of devotions from influential Christian thinkers edited by Richard Foster), and something Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplative Prayer was very relevant to the previous night's discussion:
"The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace. They are self-confident and even self-complacent. They make up their minds that they are going to attain to this or that and try to write their own ticket in the life of contemplation...
One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they "know" from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything."
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