By Gary Topping–
The Bible is full of instances of God calling people to a special vocation or to a general reorientation of their life; in fact, it is a major theme in the Scriptures. As we approach the holy season of Lent, which the Church gives us as an encouragement to contemplate our own callings from God, I’ve been thinking about some of those Scriptural instances.
Truth be told, God handed out some pretty rough treatment to some of those he called. Abraham had to agree to sacrifice his only son. Jonah spent three days and nights inside a great fish. St. Paul was knocked to the ground and blinded. And my favorite is the prophet Isaiah: toward the end of the sixth chapter, in one of the most dramatic passages in the entire Bible, he narrates his vision of seeing ”the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,” surrounded by the seraphim. “Woe is me! For I am lost;” Isaiah responds, “for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!” Then one of the seraphim takes a hot coal and holds it against Isaiah’s lips When the Lord says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah’s response this time, which is where God wants all of us to be, is, “Here am I! Send me.”
My hope, for anyone reading this, is that the closest you get to a burning coal on the chops is the ashes imposed on your forehead. An even greater hope, though, is that whether before or during Lent, we all find a way to open our lives to the transformation God wants to work in all of us and that we will be able to say, “Here am I! Send me.”
