Saying "your’re called to that." by Job Acuff

“A friend of the family adopted a baby a few years ago. He and his wife are Caucasian and the baby is African American, so occasionally they get asked interesting questions. I believe his favorite one to answer is, “What country did you adopt from?” He loves responding to this one because his answer is, “The country of Mississippi.”

There are a tremendous amount of orphans in the US and this is simply his slightly amusing away of drawing attention to the kids across the street that need to be adopted too. I was talking about adoption a few weeks ago with a different friend at dinner. I mentioned that someone I knew had adopted a special needs child from Europe. They purposely decided to adopt an older special needs child and give them a new home and a new family.

As soon as I started that story, my friend blurted out something Christians the world over say when faced with tremendous love like this, “You’re called to that.” Then he breathed a tremendous sigh of relief and went back to eating.

He was comforted by that sentence in part because of what it really means. When you hear about another Christian going off on some crazy, difficult mission for God, you get a small ping of guilt. We’re a very guilty people some times and in this particular case that guilt stems from thinking that you should also be adopting special needs kids. What are you doing right now in your life that is holy or big or adventurous? Nothing? Better throw out that get out of jail free card, “You’re called to that.”

I think that sentence is funny because it’s not complete. When we say that, what we’re really saying is, “You’re called to that and I was not. I would totally do that. I would live in Guam with clothes woven of bamboo shoot and nurse a baby llama named “Punbar” back to health with love and applesauce if that’s what God wanted me to do, but so far, gosh darn it, he just hasn’t given me that call. I’m ready though. I am ready. I’ll get you a mission trip machete if I do end up going. You’re called to that.”

Am I wrong? Have you ever heard someone say something like this? Have you ever said it?”