At some point, God calls each one of us to die.

But if I knew that that's what God was calling me to do, I think I'd be able to bear it a little bit better.

We're living in a secular culture, one word that we still use in the secular culture that

has religious origins is this word vocation.

A vocation literally is what? A calling comes from the Latin verb to call.

The word vocal comes from, vocalization. Vocation means to call. And Christianity believes that not only ministers are called into the ministry,

but lawyers are called into the law and doctors into medicine and contractors into construction

and so on, that God has a call on our lives. And what we do with our lives is in a response to a divine calling.

Now, that's not only true for Jesus, but that's true for every Christian. Every Christian has a vocation.

And normally, we just use the term vocation

and career as if they were synonyms. But sometimes God calls you to change your career.

Sometimes he calls you from one field into another, from one

job into another. And what I'd like you to think about is this, that maybe right now your

number one vocation in life is to be a mother or a teacher or a banker or a judge.

But maybe starting tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock, your chief vocation in this life for the glory of God may be to suffer.

At some point, God calls each one of us to die.

I was reading a book about a doctor who made the observation of how difficult it is to deal with those who have been diagnosed with the terminal illness.

What do you say? You come right out and bluntly tell them the situation. Do you speak euphemistically?

Do you sugarcoat the news? Do you protect people from it? And he made this observation. He says that so often

the people who state so vehemently that they want to hear the truth are the least able

to deal with. An interesting observation.

Maybe it's because we're so frightened about it that we make such strong statements that when it does come, we can't handle it.

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