Study after study proves something about us human beings that’s either very discouraging or just amusing, and it’s this: We are not very good at understanding how we’re doing. The research shows that people who are very good at what they do tend to be very self-critical and rate themselves lower than they should, and of course you know the opposite is true, that the worse people are at what they do, those people are more likely to be happy and quite confident about their skills. Perhaps you just thought this was the case only where you work. But no, it’s been proven to be true everywhere.
This shows a sign of something that actually runs much deeper: We all have a blind spot when it comes to understanding ourselves. We don’t always know what we are good at or what we could be good at, and at a deeper level we sometimes don’t even really know how to answer the question of how we’re doing, or even how we feel. And we also know why it’s so difficult to answer that question: Just getting through life day-to-day is a hard enough process, and so we keep our heads down and focus on the project at hand. The result is that sometimes, when we do stop to think about it, we can’t always tell whether we are truly happy or just in an easy routine, whether we’re tired, or if we’re tired because of some larger problem. We know what we’re doing tomorrow, but we don’t always know where we ought to be heading.
All that means that probably among the hardest gospel readings for us to identify with personally may be these stories about the call of the apostles, like the one we hear in today’s gospel. The scene we see today just isn’t realistic, is it? The four fishermen drop what they are doing as if hypnotized in a science fiction novel. Matthew uses the words “immediately” and “at once.” They drop everything and they know themselves and they know what to do, as if in response to the sheer power of Jesus’s personality.
Many times people hear readings like this with a sense that a call from God is something so dramatic that in a way they hope it never comes. We figure that what God really wants from us is so total and immediate and impossible that even if we heard that call, we hope he really meant someone else. It’s intimidating, this idea that God comes suddenly and says, “Drop everything. I’m going to take away all your possessions and friends, make you work hard your whole life, and plus maybe I’ll put you in really depressing surroundings.” If that’s what we think a call from God feels like, our regular dull lives start to look pretty good. Is God calling us to something we don’t really want to do? After all, doesn’t God love us and want us to be happy?
That’s a good question, and of course, it is also the answer to what happened in that moment between Jesus and the disciples. The disciples were human like we’re human, and since they’re human they were responding to something attractive in Jesus, not something unattractive, and so they responded because Jesus loved them, and because he loved them he wanted them to live their lives as if they knew they were loved. Somehow, when Jesus told them that they could become people who fished for people, not just fish, they knew that Jesus was offering them a chance at something glorious that would call them beyond anything they’d ever thought of before, that he wanted to liberate them so that they could act solely out of love. Being able to act out of love means that suddenly you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll fail, or about whether it’ll all work out. So calls from God aren’t like receiving an unwelcome notice that you have been drafted whether you like it or not. They are a message from someone who loves you reminding you that you have more love holding you up than you think you do.
Now of course in practice it’s easy to paint a very romantic picture of what a call from God actually feels like. You all know the joke about the drowning man at sea who when the rowboat comes to save him, refuses the help, saying that God will save him, and then when the helicopter comes and lowers the rope, refuses that help, saying that God will save him, and then after he drowns, and he goes to heaven and asks God why he never saved him, God says, “You didn’t like the helicopter?” So if you’re expecting a call from God like in a vision, you may have a long wait, but you and I are tapped on the shoulder all the time, and if we turn around, we see young people who need to be taught and mentored, we see cities that need houses and neighborhoods restored, we see a church that won’t thrive or even survive without more people to help lead it, and maybe most amazingly we see other people who inspire us with their own love and sacrifice and we wonder, on our best days, if there is some way we could be more like them.
Wouldn’t it be something if we could be the kind of people who could actually do some of that work we see around us, maybe something a little hard or a little intimidating? Well, we are that kind of people, and we are because God’s love protects us and if we allow it to, it inspires us. Like the disciples who were called in the gospel we are ordinary people who will often fail, but like them we are ordinary people who are invited to become soldiers in a great army, imperfect people who can occasionally do perfect things if we know God is with us.
What would you do, if you could really know that God loved you and wanted you? First, of course, you could relax, because you don’t have to earn God’s love. But second, with all that love inviting you, you might set off on an unexpected journey, confident that you have the only thing needed to get there.