I am firmly Calvinist in my views. I’m not on the line, or unsure about how much I agree with Calvin. I’m there. Now, if you decide to throw out some random idea from Calvin that I’m not familiar with I may not be there, but with everything I know, it just makes sense. Especially predestination. This is not uniquely Calvinist, but it is definitely a foundation of Calvinism. It just makes sense to me. When I look at my life I don’t see any point where I would have stopped living my own way and turned and said to God, “Hey, I want to follow you and stop living like this”. Sure, after God stepped in and invited me in I followed, but I never would have come up with the idea on my own. I don’t think anyone would. But this whole predestination thing brings a new set of doubts. In high school I struggled with it a lot. Today I was reminded of the struggle.
Am I chosen? Has God called me or am I lying to myself? Now in the church there are several doctrines that tell us how we can know we are saved. But these to me are all intellectual. My senior year of high school my mentor gave me the one answer that has to this day quieted the doubting on both an intellectual and emotional level. She said to me “The fact you are asking the question is the proof that you are chosen”. God doesn’t play tricks. He’s not going to plant a desire to follow him in our lives unless he is truly calling us to follow him. He’s not cruel, he’s just. I mess up, I doubt my desire to follow God, I doubt my ability to follow God, I fail to turn the other cheek, sometimes I even am the one causing another to hurt. I am far from perfect and I still struggle every day with what it means to live for God. But I have been called. I can rest in the comfort that in all my inadequacy, through all of my doubt, despite my weakness- or perhaps because of it, God is working on bringing me to him. Every step whether forward or backward is a step closer to where God is drawing me. No matter what I do he has already layed claim to me, and no one and nothing can separate me from him (Romans 8:38-39).
