Devotion - Tuesday, December 10

A check came in the mail yesterday from the Lilly Foundation.  LCM-C was awarded a "Vocations Discernment Grant."  Over the next five years, we will have resources to encourage each of you to understand your chosen field of work, your chosen field of study, as your call from God.  God doesn't need (or want) a world inhabited by professional church types.  God created a world in which nurses and cooks and engineers and accountants all do their part to guide the world in the ways of God.  We serve God when we faithfully carry out our work as teacher or vet or forest resources manager.

This morning's appointed reading from Amos 7 is an illustration of this.  I love preaching on this text, in which Amos is told by the King to go to a different country to prophesy.  The King assumes that Amos is a professional - that he chose as a job the task of speaking publicly of God, and that he can do that in another place as readily as he can in this place.  

Amos replies, "I am no prophet, nor son of a prophet."  He is not doing this because it is his job; he is not doing this in order to put meat on the table.  He speaks of God because God has spoken to him.

God's clearest statements of what God hopes for the world come through those who speak out of conviction rather than out of professional necessity.  God's care of creation is shown in the sociologist who does her work with purpose and integrity; by the physicist who molds the shield needed in chemo treatments; by the architect whose design reflects the beauty of creation.

Keep this in mind as you study for exams.  You may think you are being asked to remember and regurgitate senseless pieces of information - but in God's eyes you are preparing for the service you will offer Him and to all of creation.  You may only be thinking of the grade or the degree, but God has an eye on the way that you will better prepared to do your part in the unfolding of the Kingdom which bears the name of God.