{"id":14094,"date":"2015-03-09T10:11:51","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T10:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.joomexp.com\/wordpress\/wp-suarez\/?p=14094"},"modified":"2015-03-09T10:11:51","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T10:11:51","slug":"artificio-conceal-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/2015\/03\/09\/artificio-conceal-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The three callings of a Christian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I regularly have conversations with people about the concept of \u2018calling\u2019; what God intends for their life. This article is by a good friend, Andy Crouch, and says with clarity and conviction what I would hope every person I have that conversation with to better understand. Jared Mackey<br \/>\nIf you\u2019re a Christian, you don\u2019t have \u201ca calling.\u201d You have three. Two of the three are fundamental and universal\u2014that is, they aren\u2019t optional and they aren\u2019t individual, but they are by far the most important callings in your life. The good news (and hard news, actually) is they each come with a community who can help you fulfill them\u2014in fact, without that community you won\u2019t fulfill them at all.<br \/>\n<strong>YOUR FIRST FUNDAMENTAL CALLING IS SHARED WITH EVERY OTHER HUMAN BEING: TO BEAR THE IMAGE OF GOD.<\/strong><br \/>\nWe are here to reflect the Creator into the creation, and to reflect the creation\u2019s praise and lament back to the Creator. To bear the image is to exercise dominion, caring for and cultivating the good world and making it very good through our creative attention. Most human work falls under this heading, which is why Christians work gladly alongside neighbors who don\u2019t share our faith, and also why almost all human work is perfectly appropriate for Christians. It requires no more justification than this: bearing the image by working fruitfully in the good world is what we were always meant to do.<br \/>\nFor the great majority of human beings, this calling is fulfilled primarily in the first and most fundamental human community: the family. The image bearers are called to be fruitful and multiply. \u201cFor this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.\u201d From that union come every one of us image bearers, always already immersed in a human community, whose faces we sought as soon as we were born. This is not the \u201cnuclear family\u201d of the late industrial West, but the extended family that has known us since our birth and will, if we are blessed, surround and provide for us at our death. Whether or not we go on to form new families of our own, our human calling is inextricably linked with the family where we first found our name, language, identity, and home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I regularly have conversations with people about the concept of \u2018calling\u2019; what God intends for their life. This article is by a good friend, Andy Crouch, and says with clarity and conviction what I would hope every person I have that conversation with to better understand. Jared Mackey If you\u2019re a Christian, you don\u2019t have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/suarez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}