My entire life has been defined by a divine calling. But not my own.

When I was seven years old, my family attended a weeklong retreat at a Southern Baptist conference center in New Mexico. The theme of the week was foreign missions. My dad had just passed the twenty-year mark of a military career and found himself at a crossroads. Something or someone that week tugged at his heart, in the silent yet vaguely compelling way that many understand as God’s voice. A year later, our family arrived in Kenya, where my parents worked as evangelical missionaries for the rest of my childhood.

The missionary calling, particularly to difficult places and/or “heathen“ peoples, has long had a central place in American Protestant Christianity. I and other missionary kids grew up seeing American evangelicals celebrate the call to overseas missions to the point of idolization. I have a vivid memory of one pastor introducing my parents as “Super Christians.”

But how do we know what our calling is and whether it really comes from God? Is it possible that we could get it wrong?

My dad used various methods to test his calling. One of them I’ll call the Magic 8 Ball Bible. You stand your Bible up on its spine, let it fall open, then blindly set your finger down on the page. Whatever verse it happens to rest upon is the word God has for you.

I used this method myself to claim a (highly dubious) calling when I was ten years old and wanted to follow my older sister to boarding school. So I got out my Bible and let the Christian magic happen. I closed my eyes and put my finger on the page.

The first few attempts were confusing: “The rock badger is unclean to you because it chews the cud even though its hoof is not divided.” Weird. What is a rock badger? They have hooves? What? I tried again.

“Then because of the dire straits to which you will be reduced when your enemy besieges you, you will eat your own children, the flesh of your sons and daughters whom the Lord has given you.” Well, that’s just disturbing. Next.

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’” BINGO. BOOM. Pay dirt. My name’s not Abram, but other than that, this is the definitive word. Leave your father’s house and go to the land. Doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Armed with the Word of the Lord, I approached my parents. “God has told me he wants me to go to boarding school.”

“Is that right,” said my mom skeptically. This was her initial response to my Dad’s calling, incidentally.

“Yes, that is right. I prayed and asked God for guidance, and he gave me this verse.” I handed my open Bible over to my dad and pointed to the verse. I did not mention that this was actually the third Word I had gotten and had opted against eating rock badgers or my own children.

“Well, how about that,” Dad said. “It does say that pretty clearly.”

And that was that. God said it, we believed it, and that settled it. I went to boarding school at an age too young, with negative consequences for my life.

“This asks me how God called me to this position. I don’t understand what they want me to say,” my Tanzanian friend Emmanuel wondered.

I had urged him to apply for a position teaching Swahili at the American mission-run boarding school I attended growing up in Kenya. With very few exceptions, all its teachers for its 120-year history have been American or other white, Western missionaries. Faced with growing concerns over a colonial mindset in missions, the school set up a fund to hire African teachers.

Emmanuel was perfect for the job, a highly qualified and experienced Swahili teacher, the best one I have had in my years of study (as an adult; I did not learn it myself at Kenyan boarding school). He had taught many Westerners, including at an American university, where he spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship. He was also a devout Christian of the highest integrity. In my estimation, my alma mater could not find anyone better.

But as I looked into the application process, my hopes were dashed. They wanted to hire African teachers as missionaries first, like the other teachers at the school, and the fund they had set up was only intended as a subsidy for support the teachers would have to raise themselves. I found it absurd to expect African congregations to donate some of their meager funds to salary a teacher for a bunch of predominantly American kids. If the school truly recognized the value of having African teachers, it would remove the barriers to that end, not reinforce them with myopic ideas of “mission.”

Still, I told Emmanuel not to worry about the money, as I felt we could tap into the pool of his students over the years who loved and respected him. I did not expect the application questions themselves to present a barrier. I struggled to explain to him what I realized anew was a highly cultural notion of calling.

“Well, let me ask you, do you love teaching? Does it give you joy?” I responded.

“Yes, more than anything,” he said.

“And I know for a fact that you are extremely gifted as a teacher,” I said. “And, you’ve had various experiences and opportunities over the years that have uniquely equipped you for a cross-cultural role like this.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he said.

“So, maybe teaching is your calling, that’s what they mean. Teaching at this school aligns well with that calling, and with your particular expression of it.”

He wasn’t convinced and didn’t feel comfortable claiming the kind of calling they required. He decided not to proceed. Maybe that was God’s will for him, maybe it wasn’t. Who is to say?

I only know that my school, in Africa, still does not have a single African teacher. Not even for Swahili.

The idea of Christian calling is deeply rooted in the faith, as is the command to spread the Gospel. But how this is understood and acted on has varied greatly throughout Christian history. In Matthew 28, Jesus instructs his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” a passage often referred to as the Great Commission. In fact, that term – which has served as the ultimate missionary inspiration – is quite culturally specific, only coming into wide usage in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the idea of Manifest Destiny called for American expansion – its values as well as its territory. This had a profound effect on Americans’ understanding of religious missions, to the point that the two have often been comingled. Strong cultural currents of national (and racial) superiority have carried many American Christians far afield from the humility called for from followers of Christ.

On the level of personal faith, too – and even in secular forms of self-help – many American Christians have made calling key to lives of meaning and purpose. In fact, our particular idea of calling is a pretty modern, Western concept, the result of an abundance of choice that doesn’t exist for most of the world’s or history’s people. I imagine even the most devout nomadic herder in a remote part of Kenya spends no more time trying to discern God’s “special” plan for his life than he does what to eat for dinner.

Americans are awash in personal freedom, often paralyzed by an avalanche of options, and lost in a forest of decision trees. We pick partners and schools and degrees and careers and hometowns and houses and “chosen families” and cars and tile for the bathroom remodel, and, yes, what to eat for dinner (the absolute bane of my decadent daily existence). When I returned to the States for college, it was the cereal aisle at the grocery store that encapsulated the wonders and woes of America’s endless selection.

Making the decisions that define our lives gives us a sense of agency and destiny. But it can also produce anxiety and fuel unrealistic expectations and deep disappointments. On a spiritual level, we might live in fear of missing our calling, or feel guilt over being disobedient to it. The pursuit of something perceived as a divine calling can encourage destructive narcissism, a hero/martyr complex that erodes self-awareness and deflects accountability. Particularly in some religious cultures, it’s hard to interrogate a person’s actions when they attest to God’s direction. Calling is often claimed, rarely questioned, and impossible to test.

As one who grew up in a culture built around divine calling, I tend to be reflexively suspicious of others’ professed knowledge of God’s will. As a person of faith myself, I’ve become less fixated on what God might have planned for me personally than on the universal Christian calling to love my neighbor as myself and the winding road toward understanding what that really means and allowing it to change me. I’ve come to appreciate those who live out more ordinary lives of quiet, steady faith and basic human kindness.

Each new day offers opportunities to listen for this kind of calling – to use the gifts we’ve been given and serve the people we meet along the way. To lift others up, and share God’s love.

This is indeed a sacred calling.

The discovery and expression of who God created us to be through relationship, vocation, service, or even the most boring of responsibilities, is the miraculous conduit through which we fulfill our divine purpose.

My entire life has been defined by a divine calling that isn’t my own, but neither is it my parents’. My calling is to become part of an incredible whole, everything that came before any of us and any good we can leave behind. It is the joy propelling us and the care restraining us and the pain that changes our course. It is the enormous decision each of us makes to rise each day with the blind faith that this all adds up to something. And it is resting well at night knowing that God’s will is an unstoppable train that isn’t powered by our choices or even our understanding.

Maybe we don’t need to go searching for our calling; we only need to show up.

This article draws on the author’s book The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism (Broadleaf, 2025).