The Call Part 2

I recently read a book on managing the generations. The book was the result of studying the various generations (WW2, Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Nexters). The author suggested tailoring your management style to match the generation of each employee. Some of these guidelines are more or less true and can be helpful but they don’t address ultimate questions of identity and personality. They force a one size fits all approach to individuals that have plenty of individuality. The individual baby boomer gets lost in the shuffle of all baby boomers when we look at people this way or try to understand ourselves in this way. Os Guinness (in his book “The Call”) noticed that many people use these categories rather than dealing with individuality and seeking to understand why they are the way they are. In the end, you are a prisoner of your “category.” It can be race, gender, class, generation, or ancestry. In fact we invent new categories everyday and men even categorize each other by their jobs.

Guinness also points out another angle of attack on the problem of “who am I” and “why am I alive”. Some folks say you “just do it” and you can be anything you have the courage to be. A philosopher named Nietzche decided that the concept of God (and God too of course) was dead. You had to muster up the courage to be a superman. Either obey yourself or be commanded. Use self mastery and will power to pull yourself up to the heights and then you can claim you did it because you willed it to be. In our society we do plenty of self construction. We can develop the identity we want by our selection in our consumer society. Who you are is just one more thing you can purchase off the shelf. You craft who you are. We have no clue why. Our purpose is gone but we can craft ourselves as long as the money holds out. Einstein said that a perfection of means and a confusion of goals seems to characterize our age. We find ourselves at a moment in history with great means to act but we have some how lost the script and don’t know what the goal is.

Reality has a nasty way of showing us that it can take more than a strong will to achieve a goal. Being constrained by categories is tough but being told I can be anything I want to be is tougher. Then when I fail it is bigger than plain vanilla failure because it is a failure of my will and spirit. This dead end has resulted in some folks taking a third position that can be thought of as a belief that we are “constituted to be”. We are told by this philosophy that we bear the seeds of what we will be from birth. But these folks end up bowing at the altar of fate and determinism. They live in a crushing place that is forcing them into a form both from within and without to be something. They may be little more than spectators in the process.

All three positions have grains of truth. I am certainly influenced by all the categories that I fit into. I can certainly achieve a great deal when I decide to do it. I am clearly constituted to be something by my nature and not be other things by my nature (Michael Vick will not face me in the NFL). I know that I am unique in God’s eyes. I am not constrained to be … I am called to be.

Guinness points out that:

The Caller sees and addresses us as individuals – as unique, exceptional, precious, significant, and free to respond. He who calls us is personal as well as infinite and personal in himself, not just to us. So we who are called are addressed as individuals and invited into a relationship (“I have called you by name,” God said). We are known with an intimacy that is a source of gratitude and soul-shivering wonder (“Such knowledge,” the psalmist wrote, “is too wonderful for me”). The notion of life as karma, or the belief that your future is unchangeably “written,” is as far from the truth of calling as you can get.

God is calling right now. He has a plan right now. You may have ignored Him for years. He still has a plan to move you from where you are to where you need to be. God’s discipline is a precious thing that brings life. God’s discipline corrects us and leads to His blessing.

Joel 2:25-27 (ESV)
I will restore to you the years
that the swarming locust has eaten,
the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter,
my great army, which I sent among you.
“ You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
and praise the name of the Lord your God,
who has dealt wondrously with you.
And my people shall never again be put to shame.
You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel,
and that I am the Lord your God and there is none else.
And my people shall never again be put to shame.