When the Call Comes
In August of 2002, I received a call.
My wife, daughter, and I were at Chautauqua Institution in western New York state. It was a Monday night. My son Allan called and said, “Dad, the FBI is here. They are looking for Ike.”
Nobody likes to get a call like that. Nobody knows what to do with a call like that. May you never get a call like that!
But there is another “call” that comes now and then during your life which can be as mysterious, as challenging, as dramatic as that call from the FBI. I refer to the “call” from God, from the Universe, from your own soul to be the person you need to be, to become the person the world needs you to be, to do the work that is suited for you and only you.
This is what we see in the experience of the great Hebrew prophet Isaiah. He tells his own story in chapter 6, which I just read.
There are many things in this narrative that could draw our attention. The reference to King Uzziah invites us to study the historical situation of this event. The description of Isaiah in the temple invites us to consider the social setting of Isaiah’s entire ministry as a prophet of God. Isaiah’s resistance to his encounter with God—“Not me, Lord, because I am a sinful man and I live in a sinful community.”—pushes all of us to confess our essential unworthiness.
Any of these pieces of this prophetic puzzle could demand our attention today, and with great profit.
But what captures my attention is the experience of call, of feeling something around us or within us that pulls us in a new direction. We refer to it as if it is something we can hear with our ears, but really, it grips our soul, our imagination, our very being with existential drama, with radical redirection, with a power over all of our senses. We suddenly become aware of who we are and what we need to do. We stand in a revelation of what is true, and good, and beautiful. We are swept along with a current wider and deeper than mere emotion.
A voice calls us forward. We are swept along. We discover our self, our purpose in life, the path we are to walk.
We have Isaiah’ story, famous and influential in world literature. But today, I want to tell you three other stories, very different, very similar, very powerful, very present today, able to inspire you to listen carefully, watch intently, open completely to what is happening to you, around you, and through you.
I.
Opal Lee came walking through Brunswick, Georgia.
She was 89 years old. Opal Lee was a retired schoolteacher in Ft. Worth Texas. For years, she had engaged in efforts to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Her most famous strategy was the annual 2.5-mile walk. This drew attention to the 2.5 years it took for the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to work it way to Texas and free the slaves. Every year, she sponsored a symbolic 2.5-mile walk, first in Texas, then all the way to Washington DC. Her goal? Make Juneteenth a national holiday.
In 2016, just about the time my wife and I moved to Glenn County, Georgia, Opal Lee started walking. She was 89 years old! I was 66 and my move to Georgia was a retirement strategy. She was 89 years old and her walk to DC was a campaign strategy.
I had just relaunched the radio version of The Meetinghouse. Opal Lee came to Georgia, and I talked with her. “I’m going to DC,” she said. “People need to know about what happened in 1863.” Not everybody wants to teach Black history. When did you first learn about Juneteenth? When did you first learn about the Tulsa Race Riot? Much of the wicked history of our country has been suppressed, is being suppressed.
That first Juneteenth event was reading General Order #3 announcing the freedom of the slaves in Texas occurred at the Reedy Chapel AME church on south Broadway, in Galveston Island, Texas. That is re-enacted every year, and a few years ago, I was there to see and hear it all.
Opal is still today an active member of the Baker Chapel AME church in Fort Worth, Texas.
What would propel an 89-year-old woman to march from Texas to DC?
She had a call, a vision, a compulsion from deep in her soul. It motivated her to do something crazy! Something audacious! Something wacky! From September of 2016 to January of 2017, she walked: not every mile between Ft. Worth and DC, but 2.5 miles a day, in 14 different states, including Georgia.
They call her the Grandmother of Juneteenth. In June of 2021, at the age of 94, she was an honored guest in the White House as President Joe Biden signed federal legislation making Juneteenth a national holiday.
The late great poet Mary Oliver asks the only question that matters, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Opal Lee did something, in response to a call, a commission, a crazy intuition. It is as if that same voice that got the attention of Isaiah called out to Opal: “Who will go for us?” Opal Lee heard that voice, and said, “I will. Send me.”
II.
All over Henderson County you can find for sale items that carry the slogan, “The Mountains Are Calling.”
The now-famous naturalist John Muir lived in California a long time ago. In a letter dated September 3, 1873, he wrote to his sister, “I will soon be off again, determined to use all the season in prosecuting my research—will go next to Kings River, a hundred miles south, then to Lake Tahoe and adjacent mountains, and in winter work in Oakland with my pen…. I write occasional for the Overland Monthly, but neither these magazine articles nor my first book will form any finished part of the scientific contribution that I hope to make…. The mountains are calling, and I must go … I will work on while I can….”
He is now known as the Father of the National Parks. But then, he was an unknown adventurer, captivated by an idea, driven by a call. The mountains, the streams, the peaks, the valleys, and everything in between, flesh and stone, called to him, seized his imagination, drove his spirit, shaped his life.
He heard something, deep within. He heard something from the mountains.
That experience of hearing what Pearl Buck once described as the Call of the Wild is more common than you think. Just ask Professor Aaron Simmons.
Last Monday, I talked with Dr. Simmons. I started what I call my Tangle Tour. The name is inspired by a graphic design drawn by my wife Jan. I don’t know why it caught my attention! It spoke to my soul, in some way. That is the way things happen!
I set up shop in the event center of Fruman University. My whole family was there. Some of you have seen these pictures online. Allan is driver, stage manager, and sales manager. (And I do have some more books for sale today.)
Bill Loftus and Mike Carver from around these parts sang a lot of John Prine. Ike Moody talked to us about his new art, using the Latin phrase “salvitur ambulando” (meaning “solved by walking”), and then Dr. Aaron Simmons took a seat center stage and started talking about his book, and his experience with the outdoors, and what happened to him during the COVID.
Simply put, this is what he said: “The mountains were calling. The bike trails were calling. The trout streams were calling.” And off he went, to reframe his life, meditate on his work, and write a book.
His experience is the experience of millions. The mountains call, the trails call, the streams call; and people hear, feel, and sense something deep within. Are their stories like this in the Bible? Of a garden of Eden, of the Promised Land, of the places described by David when he wrote, “The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures. He restores my soul.”
How often the hills, the flowers, the streams of living water find their way into the teaching of Jesus? When Saul was converted, the Bible says, he went to the wilderness. For three years.
What is it about nature that calls us? The sights and sounds, the smells and feels of the wide wonderful world reach deep into our souls and call us to rest, and worship, to walk and talk, to sit in wonder and worship. The Mountains are calling, and sometimes they reach down into the depths of our being and change the way we live and move and have our being.
Often, it is the very voice of God that calls from God’s own creation, inviting us to discover the world and discover ourselves, to embrace the creation and to embrace our very selves.
The mountains are calling.
III.
Tomorrow at noon, I will be in Campbellsville, Kentucky. My Tangle Tour will set up shop in the President’s Dining Hall at Campbellsville University. I don’t think the president will be there, but who knows! One person there will be Jeremy Strand. I have heard his story, and I want others to hear it.
It is driven by a vision.
In South Africa.
Years ago, before he could have known anything about his crazy, irrational decision to move from Utah to Kentucky. “Why Kentucky?” asked him. His answer always went back to the vision. I’m not going to tell the details. I will post the video of our conversation on the web site, themeetinghouse.net, as I do all the videos. But his answer also had to do with art, and horses, and a search for housing. How did he and his wife end up in, of all places, Campbellsville, renting houses and teaching gospel?
His story is as irrational, as mysterious, as unusual as that of Isaiah. He also heard a voice, of sorts, a call, an invitation to move. Just like God said to Abraham, “Go. Go from your own country, the country of your family and friends. Go to a new place, to a place that I will show you.” Abraham, of biblical fame, was not the last person to hear this call, feel this urge, and sense this vocation. Abraham was not the last person to do something crazy, to do something to find himself, to find his direction in life, to find his purpose in life.
Can you image what that conversation was like: “Sara, I think we will move out of Mesopotamia.” Where do you want to move, honey? she responded. “Well, I’m not sure,” the man of the house said. And she surely responded, “I’ll wait for a little more information before I start packing, OK?”
But sometimes, when the call comes, you have to go.
Isaiah heard a voice, “Who will go for us?”
I wonder sometimes how many times Isaiah heard that voice in the temple before he acted, before he responded, before he understood what was happening. It takes us a while to catch on, doesn’t it? But that voice from above, that voice from within, that voice from God, from the universe, from our soul is what we need to hear and obey.
It is pointing the way toward a future we can barely see.
Today, my message is this: be like Isaiah. Be still, listen to the voice, pay attention to the vision, feel what is happening to you. You are being summoned to something, to be something, do something, say something. Take the words of Isaiah as your own and say, “Here I am. Send me.”
