Call, Discernment and Action

Defining ‘call’ is endlessly difficult. It can be a problem when people play the ‘God told me to’ card or the ‘I’m still waiting to hear from God’ card, but to not stop and carefully spend time discerning God’s direction in our lives is also a problem.

Biblically, some people had a very clear and audible call. I believe such clear calls can still happen, but that they are not to be expected. For me, discerning call is about an intersection of head and heart. With my head I can research a possibility and be practical about if my skills, interests and abilities are sufficient for the task. I can decide if the negatives are worth it. With my heart though, I am also looking to see if it is something I am passionate about, if there is something that draws me in.

Walking on the path or falling into the deep river
can be a fine line at times!

Discerning a call is not an expectation of perfection. We live in a broken world and have to deal with that. It is not needing to know everything, as I know that there will always be challenges and blessings down the road which are not evident now. It is giving due diligence to finding out what I can at this point in time.

In small questions, discerning God’s will is a small matter as the Word gives us direction in life. Are we called to love our neighbours? Yes! So do it, in whatever ways big or small today.

In big questions though, discerning God’s will and God’s call is a bigger challenge. That is when I call on mentors, prayer supporters and those who know me well and that I trust.

A language allocation is a big question, as the decision results in many years working in an often isolated situation as well as a relationship and commitment to a group of people that I would not want to break.

In making this decision it is important to me to hand the decision over to God. Is this the place the skills, interests and limitations God has given me best intersect with the many immediate needs around us? In making this decision prayerfully and in community I am given strength. In the long run, when the hard times come, I will be able to look back and say ‘God, you lead me here and you will lead me through.’  If I simply follow the directions of people, it is easy to say ‘The person-I-listened-to didn’t know what they were doing!’ It is hard to say ‘God didn’t know what he was doing!’

The story of my call to work as  Bible translator in PNG is a story of discernment along the way. The idea of translation was presented to me at a youth camp and would not go away, so I followed up on it. Eventually I did two months ‘work experience’ here in PNG, mostly in a remote village. At the end of two months I felt called to the work. Something in me knew it was the path I was to walk,  although I still had to work through my desire to live a ‘normal’ life. I did not feel called to a place and knew the timing was not right, but I felt called to the work.

Which way? There are many 'short cuts' through the palms
and many dead ends too.

It took me nearly ten years to get to the translation field full time. These were ten years in which God shaped me and prepared me. On a practical front I completed an honours degree in anthropology, worked full time at sea (which has given me all sorts of skills handy for life here), went travelling (so that now I do not feel the need to wander off), and completed theology and linguistics degrees. Personally, the time was spent building connections at home, repairing some broken relationships, (mostly!) letting go of the dream of marriage and maturing a lot. When I left PNG after my two months of taste-and-see I was overwhelmed by the sense of call and the implications that had. When I returned, I was trained, ready, willing and excited. I was, and am, committed to this work for the long haul.

Choosing to work in PNG was a process of elimination, not of big signs from God. I wanted to work in the Pacific Area. Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands were my first choices, but they both said they could not support extra singles at the time. PNG on the other hand, was more than willing to have more singles (we’re something like 20% of the Branch) and had lots of useful things I could help with while I sorted out the partnership question.

After two years of being a generally helpful linguist and testing other skills by filling a need in the Project Office, I am now in the stage of seriously considering which place to work in long term. There has been little guidance on how to make such a decision, so with other unallocated linguists we formed a group, to work out this big question together. We called ourselves ‘Translators Exploring Allocations’ (TEA), although some days ‘Unallocated Linguists Anonymous’ may have been more accurate!

For three months we have been meeting several times a week. We have invited Regional Directors to tell us the priorities in their region. We have followed up on areas of interest by interviewing other translators who work nearby, by reading reports, even by going to Lae to meet with Church leadership to talk about an area which was presented as a potential need at a conference in January.  We have done team building exercises to help with the partnership challenge singles must face. We have all also been working on our secondary assignments (discourse analysis paper, grammar paper, writing for the Communications department… and more).

Along the way we have found that we have formed a group that is now looking at the possibility of working together as a larger team among a group of languages. We have been surprised at the consensus between us. As we have listened to people and listened to God through prayer, the same potential projects have generally gone on and off the list of possibilities at the same time. When five people, each from a different cultural background, reach consensus like this, I think God is at work.

We now have two places that we have agreed to take the next step in checking out through a pre-allocation trip. The plan is to do workshops in each place that allow us to be there for a time and to be helpful to the community, but without having to commit for the long term. The thought of saying ‘no’ to one place and ‘yes’ to the other makes me nervous. The knowledge that we’ve had consensus along the way so far gives me comfort, as I do believe God is with us in this difficult decision making process.

‘Call’ a slippery thing that can be used as an excuse for inaction or for rash action, but it is also an essential for me in a decision as big as a allocating to a language community long term. It is head and heart working together. It is listening to the advice of the community around me, seeking to move in the direction the branch is going and among the cacophony of needs in PNG, choosing one. It is difficult and time consuming. My prayer is that these months of discerning are an investment in the future, a foundation on which a partnership, a team and project can be firmly built. It is listening to God and then stepping out in faith.