A Cloak Thrown Over an Ordinary Day

Elisha did not get his calling at a retreat or a conference. He got it in a field, on a workday, covered in dust, walking behind the twelfth pair of oxen. There is something almost funny about the detail. He was not even at the front of the operation. He was at the back of the line, doing the slow, unglamorous part of the job. And that is exactly where the prophet found him. Elijah does not give a speech. He walks past, throws his cloak over Elisha's shoulders, and keeps going. The call was that simple and that physical: a weight on your back that was not there a moment ago.

I think a lot of us are waiting for our purpose to arrive in a more impressive package. We imagine it will come with clarity, a plan, maybe a sign so obvious we cannot miss it. Meanwhile we are plowing. We are in the lab at nine at night, or wiping down tables at a part time job, or sitting through a required class that has nothing to do with the major we actually want. We quietly assume God is not paying attention to this part. But the whole witness of Scripture says otherwise. Moses was tending sheep. Gideon was threshing wheat. Amos was keeping a few sycamore trees. And Elisha was driving oxen. God seems to prefer finding people in the middle of their ordinary work, because that is where He can see what they are made of.

Look at what Elisha does next. He slaughters the oxen, uses the plow itself as firewood, and feeds the whole neighborhood. He does not just leave his old life behind. He turns it into a meal for other people. That is a picture of what calling actually looks like. Your old plans, your skills, your years of practice, none of it is wasted. It gets cooked down and offered up so that someone else can eat. Today is Veterans Day, and on Guam that is not an abstract idea. Many of you grew up in families where someone put on a uniform and gave years of their life to a purpose larger than themselves. Interestingly, November 11 is also the day the church remembers Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier who saw a freezing beggar at the city gate, cut his own cloak in half with his sword, and handed it over. Two cloaks on the same day. One thrown over a farmer to call him, one cut in two to clothe a stranger. Both say the same thing: purpose is found when something that was yours becomes something you give.

So here is the question for this Wednesday. What field are you standing in right now, and are you willing to be found there? Do not wait until you are at the front of the line. Do not wait until the work feels meaningful. Ask God to let you feel the weight of the cloak right where you are, behind the twelfth yoke, and then be ready to leave the oxen and run. He may not call you to a pulpit or a mission field. He may call you to a kitchen table, a dorm room, a research project, a classroom, or a stranger who is cold at the gate. Whatever it is, it will probably start the way Elisha's did: in the middle of a normal day, when you least expect it, with God walking past and claiming you as His own.