Discerning Our Calls

This week I have been thinking about my call and how it is intimately intertwined with service and social justice. I was asked to speak to a group of prospective students about discerning your call with emphasis placed on social justice and service. I find this slightly difficult because I am still discerning my call so how can I tell someone else how to discern his or hers? I have eight months of seminary under my belt and taking it day by day. I am a member of a group of students dedicated to social justice and sustainable community engagement. I want to volunteer and I want to get others interested in volunteering…but what does that have to do with my call?

For me, the first step in this was determining what I truly care about. There are so many important things that interest me like tutoring and literacy, but what is closest to my heart? What motivates me? I realized that for me there are two things: homelessness and LGBTQ teens and young adults. Unfortunately, these issues tend to go hand and hand.

So what does this mean for my call? Well, first it means that I am doing this now to connect myself with this. Last semester I spent a number of Saturday nights in Philadelphia volunteering at a drop in center for LGBTQ young adults helping out with personal care kits and anything else they needed and volunteering at different World AIDS day events. I am going through training to become a volunteer for the Trevor project 800 hotline and setting up a partnership between our group on campus BGLASS and the Triad-House (a home in Trenton for homeless, abused, and neglect LGBT teens). These things are not to brag about what I have done but rather because I believe that, your call is firmly rooted in your past. And the service and social justice that we are passionate about. I feel called to congregational ministry, but a congregational ministry that has an interest in these things.