The Lord Doesn’t Call the Qualified; He Qualifies the Called!

All over the nation in recent weeks, commencement speakers from the most modest backwater high schools to the most prestigious of universities have sounded a call to graduates to rise to the challenges and opportunities of the new millennium, to be fleet of foot and of mind, and to be ready to take the risks that are the price of building a better world. To the extent that any of the graduates are actually listening, those messages seem for the most part not only obvious but quite achievable; life has not yet given most of them the sense of limits and of tentativeness that the passage of years brings to most.

Abram was no starry eyed graduate, but an old man full of years, with a life history not only of achievement but of the full range of those sorrows and failures from which no human is exempt. He had every reason to believe that his life's work was done or nearly so. And the Lord's call to him came as a shock. But there was in him no faltering or looking back, no whining or hand wringing about the unfairness of the Lord's expectations of an old man. There was only a "yes," a response made possible by his absolute confidence in the Lord's love of him. And with his "yes" he became the father of a great people.

Even for the oldest and most fragile among us, the Lord still has good and great work to be done. And it can be done, if only we'll trust the one who calls us. Remember: The Lord doesn't call the qualified, he qualifies the called!