What does a Calling feel like?

Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille and the crew from Monty Python have made some broad efforts to try and approximate a Divine calling, between burning bushes and holy grails and the like. The truth is, with all the metaphorical language that can be brought to bear, there's real difficulty in providing a description that'll carry water. Still, being a guy of considerable cranial density, allow me to give it a go.

A Calling is both simultaneously Ethereal and Visceral. By this, I mean to say that though its as hard to catch as a nightbird, it presents itself in a way that will not be ignored. Man is called to the Divine service in eternity past and that calling exists before his DNA is formed. In other words, just as it is with the Lord's election, the Lord's calling stretches back eternally. Yet in spite of all the heavenly mist, I was aware of a calling when I was six years old. Now understand that as a young crumb cruncher, quantifying this call at a tender age was impossible for all practical purposes.

Age, maturity, awareness of the Divine along with life's experiences all worked in harmony to reveal the dimension and scope of this Holy calling. What at six years was little more than pictures in the sky became like an architect's sketches. These too in time were fleshed out to a point where the calling would begin solidification. This process has shown be that:

A calling is Dynamic and Unfolding. Abram didn't have the Lord's opus dropped on his desk in one delivery. God's call to Abe, though settled, unfolded with each step made by the patriarch. With each drop of sweat, each bend in the road, the call unfolded before his eyes.

I had no sense whatsoever in the late 1980's that my calling would take me to the Anglican expression of the Faith, or place me in a Dalmatic. Its quite likely that I would have repudiated the idea as nonsense. Yet, here I stand. Each footprint across time and territory, across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, has purposefully led he to this moment.

A calling is Inescapable. Moses bugged out of the whole Egyptian scene and hit the road to Median. Jonah, after saying "nuts to this", hopped a west-bound boat to Spain. Saint Paul said "Woe is me if I do not preach the Gospel." Moses would live another lifetime before the Almighty caught up with him, and still a third living out that Holy calling. Jonah was brought back to shore special delivery, in the belly of a beast of a fish. Saint Paul finished the race in the bowels of the Mammertine Prison. The Lord's call on each of these lives was irrevocable.

Maybe, this has given a sense of just what it feels like to be Called by the Almighty.