He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn’t go to college. He never visited a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the great things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying…his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the piety of a friend.

An old meditation, cited in pg 158 of Long Journey Home by Os Guinness.

The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

Soren Kierkegaard’s Journal

And the biblical faiths say, “Follow the call of your Creator” – there’s no greater purpose and fulfillment for anyone than in discovering and living out the design for which God created us and sent us into the world. (pg 209)

How then do we travel the journey purposefully and finish well? The way to make the most of the journey of life and faith is to answer the call of our Creator, and in so doing discover the purpose for which we were created and to which we’re called. The great Creator alone creates completely out of nothing – fruitfully and prolifically. He alone knows our reason for being, by which he calls us into a life of purpose. (pg 212)

What is meant by “calling”? Simply that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service. (pg 213)

Dallas Willard writes, that all of us have “a unique eternal calling to count for good in God’s great universe.”

This truth – the call to be followers of the way, with the entrepreneurial vision and energy it provides – has been a driving force in many of the greatest “leaps forward” in history; the constitution of the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai, the birth of the Christian movement in Galilee, the sixteenth-century Reformation and its incalculable impetus to the rise of the modern world, and the abolition of slavery and slave trade in the West, to name a few. (pg 214)

…calling is the most comprehensive reorientation and the most profound motivation on the human journey. Answering the call is the way to find and fulfill the central, entrepreneurial purpose of your life as you journey home. (pg 215)