Thank God for Casey Kasem

I always “hate” when people say “tell me about your call”. Mostly this is due to the fact that it is still being formed. I am being shaped and will always be in process. I know things at this moment that I didn’t know before. God has a “funny” way of working in us. If you had asked me the call question at thirteen, seventeen, twenty two, or even yesterday vs. six months ago (I’m thirty) the answer would be different but with a singular overarching theme. Something larger than me beckons (now I know that is God, but I didn’t always know that).

At thirteen having been abused (with that still present at that time) and self-harming, I had a strange sense of call. I felt “marked” for something, which was also part of my will or drive to survive and move away from the situation. I spent afternoons outside on my picnic table with my “boom box” (insert: white radio with little kid dials, a handle on the top with a red and blue microphone attached) and wait for Madonna’s “Just Like a Prayer” to come on Casey Kasem's top forty count down on Fly 92 so I could belt it out karaoke style (thankfully the nearest neighbors were a 1/2 mile away on either side). Why that song? One could argue that the theology of it is terrible (if present at all), but at that time it drew me in (I certainly didn’t get what it was really about anyway). I didn’t care about any other song… I had a prayer.

Alongside Madonna was my grandma who kept saying that I was going to be a nun (she just “had a feeling”). This was a joke of course, said because she wanted me to stay “her baby” and because she didn’t want the hassle of being annoyed by a teen who “suffers from every psychopathology known to humanity: depression as aggression directed against the self; manic-depressive mood swings; obsessional guilt and compensation; hysteria that appears after long periods of concentration; suicidal thoughts as displaced aggression against one's caretakers; and megalomania, in which the adolescent will now resolve the world's problems.” (Loder) This was also funny because we're not Catholic. However, it stirred in me. I didn’t totally reject it; I wanted to be Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act.

I also in the midst of the destructiveness around me and in me, felt at times that I was a bit of a “martyr”. I had feelings about the pain I was experiencing being used for good. I didn’t seek out situations that would “martyr” me, but simply felt that there must be some good to come of my terrible situation (of course I certainly don’t think I am a “martyr” now). As Loder puts it “This (hypothetico-deductive thinking) is the final, decisive move out of egocentrism insofar as intellectual competence is concerned, but it is also accompanied by a heightened intellectual narcissism, so that even in this last move out of egocentrism as intelligence, there is still a residual form of it-an egocentrism of new enthusiasm and sense of omnipotence of reflection".

In high school my friend’s mom was a youth group leader. I was happy to make friends and to be a part of the group, however, once again something in me stirred. I felt the need to join the actual church itself (which was a traditional, rural, East coast, old Reformed Church with a volunteer youth leader… I certainly felt no pressure from pastor or people to do so). I wanted more. So I took the Belonging class and I joined with very little sense about how "weird" that really was.

In college I moved to the Midwest with my “residual ego form”. I learned all kinds of crazy new things that I never knew before and then proceeded to “teach” my family what they just couldn’t see. We all go through this stage, but I was a bit insufferable. I was taking things in, but also rejecting things, especially ways that people can be taken into a self-serving sort of religion. I didn’t know then why it made me so angry. I couldn’t understand why some of my friends could just shrug it off as no big deal while I felt incensed. I now know of course that it’s because I do care so deeply, and that is probably because I am called.

After college I used my psychology degree to go sell things for a corporation in New Jersey. I thought all the while that I wanted to land back in Iowa (why? who knew?). I then took my job as the Coordinator of church relations for a small private college. I wanted to have a job where my “sales skills” lined up with advancing the kingdom and with doing the good work of helping young people to find the path that I did. Then seminary became possible via distance learning, and I am happy to be on the journey.

All in all I have discovered that our development and our call go hand-in-hand. They are inextricably intertwined. I used to know a pastor who said that he knew that he was called when God audibly told him at fourteen to go preach. I was so jealous of this “God told me ever so clear” story for a long time. While I do not judge or aim to ever know the calling of another, I have come to learn that my way is just as beautiful. God is beautiful. Even if my story doesn’t have the same instant “wow” delivery, I've got Madonna, gramma, Whoopi, & passion.



Reference:
James E. Loder. The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective (Kindle Locations 2923-2924). Kindle Edition.