In the Spring of 2023, I spent eight days at a retreat center in Virginia. The purpose was to process some of the pain of the past three years and get my heart in line with God’s calling on my life. Just 20 months prior, my family and I had lost our home of 15 years when the Taliban retook Afghanistan. Through the displacement of Afghans in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from the country, we lost contact with many of our friends. Perhaps the greatest loss, however, was the loss of purpose. For fifteen years we had labored to see the gospel implanted in the hearts of an unreached people group living and breathing on Afghan soil. With our displacement and the displacement of so many friends, it seemed that that dream was to remain unrealized, and we were too damaged to return to it.
With the loss of these things, I was grappling with what it meant to be called by God for the work we thought we were supposed to do. After living under security threats for 15 years, I was drained. Having had most of my friends displaced or disappointed by their new reality after 20 years of war, I was questioning the worth of all that sacrifice. Much of the pain and disappointment associated with this had become associated with the way I heard the very term “calling”. It was as if “being called” meant “experiencing self-destruction and disappointment” for God’s purposes.
While in Virginia, I was able to process my grief over the loss of local friends, particularly for some betrayals I had experienced. I used the practice of lament to process this. I experienced some relief from the anger and grief I was feeling. But then towards the end of my time there, the real impact came. Spontaneously, I sat down with one of my hosts for lunch. The day before, he had asked me about calling, and I told him how I felt about the term these days after the trauma I’d experienced. So as lunch drew to an end, I asked him about his calling.
Now, this man had been a pioneer for the very work that we had done in our ministry. He was the catalyst for work among the people group we sought to reach, and in the country where we sought to reach them. So, I wasn’t surprised when he started off by saying, “When I was younger, I would have said my calling was to tell Muslims about Jesus, particularly the people group you and I served.” But it was his next sentence that has had me thinking since the words exited his mouth: “But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that my calling is the Caller. I just want deeper communion with Jesus.”
I started to tear up as he said this. Of all people, I expected him to urge me towards that initial calling, to get back in the game, to keep working at the things he had catalyzed in the 1980s. But no. He didn’t. He said to pursue the Caller. That was the key objective.
During the week of my retreat, I had also been reading the Gospel of John. I had just read John 4 and 5. After lunch, I went off to pray and reflect and the Lord spoke to me again through those passages. I noticed that in both stories, one of the Samaritan woman (John 4) and one of the lame man (John 5), each person encounters Jesus but offers logistical excuses that guard them from engaging him directly. The Samaritan woman is worried about well–drawing utensils. The lame man, after being offered Jesus's most provocative question (“What do you want?), describes his decades–long struggle with speedy movement. In both cases, the answer they long for, the “gift” as Jesus puts it, stands before them, offering himself.
It has now been nearly two years since that retreat. My family and I returned to Central Asia, albeit a different country, and in our return, I entered into a full–time job in university administration. To be honest, the questioncof “calling” lingered as an unanswered one with our return. I told the Lord that I wanted simplicity. I wanted to enter full–time work wholeheartedly and live as a disciple in that context.
I have lived in the missions community for over 20 years. Many people talk about access and platform and doing the “main thing.” Mission leaders and supporting churches want to know how our “strategy” emerges out of our platform. I’ve always struggled with this language as it can be prone to denigrate the warp and woof of how most people, including the unreached, live out their lives. They must earn a living. They must raise their children. Few have the privilege of defining their daily activities as mere platforms or access strategies for existence.
Two authors have provoked me deeply as I’ve pondered these things and entered the challenge of routine life where someone else dictates my schedule and often defines my agenda. In Life in the Beloved, Henri Nouwen writes, “Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do.”1 (p. 45). This image of enfleshment or embodiment of the love of God has deep resonance with the statement of calling that my counselor gave me in March 2022. If our calling, our most basic and fundamental calling, is to commune with Jesus, then we are to do this in all spheres of life—not just the “main thing.” This communion defines us, and it should define us in the most routine and basic elements of interactions with other human beings—like, for me, students, teachers, and fellow administrators. Under the stress and confusion that I often face, can I be an embodiment of love in these moments?
The second author, Dallas Willard puts this same idea in other words:

Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opened access to the governance of God with him… By relying on his word and presence we are enabled to reintegrate the little realm that makes up our life into the infinite rule of God.… Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element in God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours. (p. 35)2

Willard’s recognition that we have a realm of life whose purpose is to be integrated into the infinite rule of God gives purpose to all aspects of life. Moreover, the last two sentences above indicate the heart of my own journey as a disciple of Jesus the last two or three years. I’ve wanted to reckon with how the simplest and smallest acts are of huge significance in the life of God. I prayed, labored and cried for the big breakthrough of the kingdom among an unreached people group most my life. I was always in a hurry to get there. In God’s providence, our time in Afghanistan ended and the fruit of that labor remains a mystery.
On this end of that experience, I wonder now at the smallest of acts that never make the headlines. I think of one of the teachers in my department trying to figure out how to better love a student in his class with significant social problems. Can I be a supportive resource to empower this kind of love? Or the male students in my class who have probably seen or experienced domestic abuse. When I am deeply frustrated with them, the Lord, the one who has come to intertwine himself in my life, reminds me that they don’t just need another male figure in their lives chiding and condemning them.
The intertwining of my life in the life of God is a fundamental part of this renewed sense of calling in my life. Internal voices, supporting churches, mission leaders, and missional colleagues often ask me about my mission or strategy. I live among unreached peoples and spend dozens of hours each week with unbelievers. I want them to know the love and grace of God in the person of Jesus and through my life and words. In this current season, I have repeatedly sensed God’s calling and affirmation to simply be Jesus's disciple—to follow his lead daily—as my fundamental strategy. Often this “strategy” means the very real effort to feel and believe that I am beloved of God, defined solely by him and what he says about me. On the best days, it is the conscious recognition that I am seeking to live, walk, breathe, work, parent and husband with Jesus day by day and moment by moment. This means a fundamental surrender to Jesus's teaching and presence that can and does translate into a word and deed announcement of Jesus's good news. And yet, what feels most profound but hardest to articulate is a deep–level satisfaction or contentment that if I do nothing more than live and move with the Living Jesus today, it will be a very good day.

Check out Afghan Mountain Faith at William Carey Publishing.