I’m just going to come right out and say it- I have a call to a prophetic vocation, and I’ve had it since I was young. I just never accepted it until recently. I don’t know what a lot of this means yet- but it’s a word and a topic that generates a lot of uncomfortable imagery in the imagination, so I avoid talking about it too-much.
I have a special affinity for Elijah, can relate to the stubbornness of Jonah, I’m a psalmist like David, and I have a knack for tenderizing the heart like John the Baptist. I also share some of their personality traits, quirks and character flaws too, and I am driven to walk down the road less-traveled despite my best efforts to avoid it.
The Misfit Trail
I’ve always struggled with making sense of what God wanted me to do with my life. Things that made sense to others didn’t make sense to me. Paths in life that are cut-and-dry for others weren’t always natural for me to accept or be content with. I never really fit in anywhere. I never really belonged anywhere.
God called me to a place that was difficult to explain or articulate, and most people that I sought advice from just didn’t get it. Heck, I don’t even get it half the time.
I also find myself driven to be alone with God during some of the most-important milestones in my life too. People were just never around when I wanted to share big news.
My timing has always been just a little askew.
In all fairness, I’d get in touch with everyone soon after these things happened, but in those first moments, it was always just me and God. Sure, I felt a little isolated and lonely, but those times also created a closeness and special dynamic in the relationship between God and myself that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
Yet, being alone with God doesn’t mean that we necessarily get along all the time either.
I’ve had a pretty vibrant relationship with the Almighty for most of my life. I’ve been the recipient of many graces and a limitless amount of love and patience, but I wrestle with God. I certainly don’t hide how I really think or feel about things when I’m not happy with whatever God is up to at the time.
Believe me, He hears about it.
My greatest frustration over the years is how I have a comfortable familiarity with God, yet God often seems nowhere to be found when I need help from the Almighty the most. Yet, if I go to God on behalf of someone or something else, BAM, He’s right there. I often scratch my head and wonder why God lets me linger in restlessness and confusion while letting everyone else off-the-hook through me.
I know that God plays hard to get in order to draw us closer. We really do absorb life-giving blessings that transform us when we have to really wait and groan for God for a while. So, misery can be fruitful, and I’m slowly learning how to appreciate the growth that comes from that. Yet, I still have a tendency to see those graces in hindsight more than in the midst of the struggle.
The Consequences of Saying No
It took a long time to be willing to wrestle and work through this, and there actually came a point when I just gave up on trying altogether.
After a series of back-to-back misfortunes, I gave God my two week notice, jumped on a plane, and I flew to the other side of the world to pretend that He didn’t exist. I managed to pull that off for six years before my wings got clipped and I nearly lost my mind.
It took Jonah three days. I’m a stubborn and tenacious guy when I want to be.
Of course, the Israelites had to wander in the wilderness for forty years, so I got off easy in all reality, and I shouldn’t complain too-much about how God seems slow to make Himself known to me at times, but I digress.
Fast forward a few more years, and I ended up pretty much exactly where I left off when I gave God the finger.
I still faced the same struggles and wrestled with the same problems. I was stuck in time- partly because I kept trying to dodge and reframe God’s call to suit my preferences, and partly because I chose to stay in a place that I learned to be content with instead of going where God wanted me to go.
I compensated by going to mass regularly, meeting all kinds of people, gaining some useful experience and developing better habits. But, I was doing this with the wrong people in a part of the Church where God didn’t want me to be rooted or formed in.
My stubbornness created an enormous amount of headaches and unnecessary struggles, in addition to taking a toll on my health, relationships, finances and pretty much everything else. My faith life and ministerial aspirations became a constant uphill battle and utter trainwreck.
Yet, somehow God met me where I was at, pulled me to where I needed to be in order to do what He wanted to do. However, I still have scars associated with knowing that I complicated the process as much as possible and prolonged the inevitable for as long as I could.
Yet, out of that, I finally accepted how the root cause of most of my problems involved control issues with the Almighty, and I didn’t want to let God drive. God is a dropper of breadcrumbs in my life. I started to sense where things were headed and I didn’t like it, so I stopped moving altogether.
Don’t do that.
If anything good can come from my nightmare, I hope it’s how my shipwreck can be someone else’s lighthouse- If God calls, respond. Trust me. Life is too-short to fight a battle that you can’t win.
Acceptance
Now that I’m actually accepting and wrestling with the prophetic streak in me instead of running from it, I can confidently say that I’m not thrilled about any of it whatsoever. When I learn and think about the prophets in the bible, and in some of our history, much of what I absorb still bothers me. Most of their lives are full of suffering and misery.
Why in my right mind would I choose to invite more of that into my life?
Think about it- most of them didn’t have happy, peaceful, secure lives. Their hunger and thirst for peace with God consumed them to the point where they lived on the edge of life and death because nothing else made sense to them. Much of that involved tremendous physical and emotional suffering.
They certainly didn’t fit in anywhere, people thought they were nuts, and they were wrecking their bodies and shipwrecking their futures for the sake of others who really didn’t want anything to do with them in the first place. On top of that, they were often called to go where they didn’t want to go and do what they didn’t want to do.
Many had some kind of impediment or character flaw that made them unlikely candidates for the job too.
Moses had a speech impediment. Jonah had an attitude problem. Elijah had all kinds of issues, yet he was whisked up to heaven when his work was done. However, Elijah wasn’t whisked to that heaven either. I believe his spirit is still around, and it will find itself in a human body once again, right before the return of our Lord.
I would imagine that John the Baptist had a long and challenging road in his life as he waited and waited and waited before God let him loose to do his thing as well.
That’s another thing- prophets wrestle with God in special and mysterious ways.
Peace and clarity seem to come only when the Holy Spirit activates them. Until then, or outside of those moments, it’s usually perpetual internal unease because they see life, faith and the world around them through a unique lens that is rarely clear.
Prophets have a special one-on-one relationship with the Almighty too. Yet, it’s often contentious and turbulent despite being intimate at the same time.
Most of them questioned, doubted and wrestled with God, and their own sanity, as they tried to make sense of things. Most had terrible realities to accept and truths to tell that nobody wanted to hear, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they also doubted half of what they were proclaiming too.
But they did it nonetheless. They were driven to it.
If they refused, they never had a moment of peace, and that can drive the soul to plead with God to just let it die. Their acceptance of whatever it was that God wanted them to do isn’t necessarily from a grateful and willing heart either. Rather, it came from a sense of utter-desperation for a small taste of inner peace.
I don’t believe these were one-and-done milestones either. This was a continual struggle, but one that became easier to manage once they got in the habit of just saying yes instead of arguing with God all of the time.
They had little support, affirmation or encouragement from others, and even the few that chose to walk alongside them didn’t always get what they were doing either. On top of all of that, it’s not uncommon for prophets to have short life spans as well.
All things being equal, this is a pretty unattractive job description that I’d prefer to turn down if I had the choice.
But do I?
Depends who I ask I suppose. The philosopher would likely say one thing, the psychologist another. Priests? Half of them don’t have time to bless a car in their own parking lot, let alone tackle this sort of thing.
I’m not complaining here- rather just highlighting how sometimes we have to hammer out things that relate to God with God.
I don’t have a choice, at least in the way that my American brain perceives that word. If I say no, I get nothing but fruitless misery. If I say yes, I get fruitful misery and a hope for a glorious future in the next life if any of that turns out to really be true.
Some choice.
Do I really believe that? If I do, then that is what is more important anyway. That alone should drive me, just as it did in the hearts of all of those who went through this in their own way when they graced the earth with their presence. If I don’t, then what’s the point to any of this to begin with? I can go live in a fake paradise now, and satisfy all of my desires while I can, and not be bothered by any of this. But I already know that I’ll never have any peace.
Despite my best efforts, I do believe, so I guess that just makes me a nut.
Welcome to the Mess
I don’t yet understand why God asks prophets to walk along such an odd path in life in order to proclaim whatever is on God’s heart and mind at the time. It is what it is.
In all fairness, there is a lot of variety associated with what prophesy is, who prophets are, and what they do, and most of it doesn’t involve the extreme examples that we find in scripture. Yet I’ll bet dollars to donuts that anyone who is invited into this strange vocation finds themselves wrestling with God and suffering to one degree or another along the way.
At their core, prophets are intercessors, teachers and preachers.
They are driven to proclaim the truth about God, and they often find themselves pleading with God on behalf of others. That’s the hard part. They’re caught smack-dab the middle of God’s love and justice with humanity’s need for God’s mercy intertwined with the willingness to sin all the time. Half the time, they’re pleading on behalf of people they don’t even really like to begin with.
Prophets swim in the middle of all of that tension most of the time. Prophets bless, instruct, rebuke, convict, warn, shepherd and guide us away from sin and into a greater degree of intimacy with God as we wander through our lives. They often do it as flawed individuals in their own right, with consciences that are seared by the conviction of unrepentant sin too.
It’s messy work. It’s challenging. It’s often thankless. It’s frustrating to wonder if and when all of that blood, sweat, tears and prayers will produce results, and most live with a degree of restlessness and isolation that is never really satisfied.
Yet, that path also brings an array of special blessings from random people and intimate times with the Holy Spirit that make it all worthwhile. Not-too-mention, their work usually has a tangible impact in the hearts, minds, lives and souls of those they are able to reach.
I’m still not sure how my persistent, yet murky inclination to proclaim the truth will play out in the real world. However, I feel better about being in this awkward state the more I accept it for what it is instead of wishing it was something else. It certainly aligns with my personality and scruffiness, and perhaps what I always assumed were character flaws are actually gifts.
Ask me in a year how I feel about all of that, but what else can I do other than see where this leads?
But for now, I’m happy to take what little consolation I can find in all of this. I certainly take some comfort from knowing that I’m in good company. Not a lot, but just enough to keep me moving forward without losing my mind.