The Vocation of the Natural Life

Simply put, I think Oswald is saying good works flow from a heart utterly devoted to God. Service is a response motivated by love, not a specific call. God's call, as Oswald emphasized yesterday, is an expression of his nature, and we respond to his glory and grace with our acts of service.

1 - He calls -- through nature, through his Word, through the Gospel lived out in His people.
2 - He specifically reveals himself to us and in us.
3 - We are compelled to respond through service, and that service takes a form fitted to our nature.

Imagine the craziness of trying to put #3 first or of isolating #3 and calling it "Christianity," but I think that's what I've been trying to do for years. Service must flow from relationship or it is not Christianity at all. It might be good and noble and even bear good fruit. It might be social justice, humanitarianism, the best of what religion has to offer; but absent of relationship, it cannot be Christianity. Indeed, without relationship, what does the compelling? Fear? Guilt? Self-importance? One might say, genuine love and concern for my neighbor apart from any kind of deity, and then I'm not sure what I would answer. Apart from any kind of deity, I have not felt it.

But let's leave that and look at #3 as it results naturally from a realization of God's glory and grace, the "fitted to our nature" part.

"It is my own little actual bit and is the echo of my identification with the nature of God," as Oswald states.

My own actual little bits, my echoes, as I see them today: to be a storyteller, a truth teller, to repeat in a variety of written and spoken forms the ways I've seen God's grace manifest in my life and the lives of others; and to serve my family and friends through listening to the details of their lives, through folding their t-shirts and underwear, through physical, tangible reminders of God's grace and beauty -- a hug, a cup of tea with milk and sugar, a poem or story -- and through an unwavering, consistent presence in their everyday lives. It's a beginning, and for now, I am determined not to rush onward into a call I do not hear.

Barbara