Your Calling is Watermarked into Your Origin

Your calling is watermarked into your origin. This is because the Creator speaks first. Many voices, both good and evil, vie for the position of second, but only the one who breathed spirit into your DNA can ever be the one who has the first word.

He shall also have the last—a prospect that should overshadow our dramas with awe. But for now, let us consider the implications of the first word. It can be summed up in this: your calling is who the Creator thought of when he said, “Let there be you.”

This is not a static pronouncement. It is not a floating billboard lost in the debris of a scattered life, with its mix of treasures and traumas. Why? Because out of the Lord’s essence proceeds energies.¹ When He says, “Let there be…”, He sends forth an ongoing dynamic. A life-giving one. A redemptive one.

This is good news. It’s good because the ineffable God, whom no one has seen or can see—the Father of lights who dwells in uncreated light—sends forth into our lives an energizing dynamic that no one can erase. Because He is, this dynamic also is. 

And that is very good, because it becomes the throughline in the ups and downs of our lives. Whether hallowed memories or horrific incidents, whether our family was fun or fractured or both, nothing can stop His throughline. Nothing. 

This is how redemption works. Like spilled wine soaking into a white cloth napkin, His original thought about us runs through the threads of our life’s fabric, both the tidy and the messy. It cannot be stopped. It can only be overlooked. Or ignored.

But let us not ignore the redemption that bleeds into our lives from Another. We are made of better stuff than a hardened heart, if we choose so, and we do choose. Therefore, our job is to detect the throughline—the energizing dynamic—the redemptive thing that shows up when we are at our best or at our worst. It simply cannot go away because He will not go away. He is like the dad playing hide and seek with his little one, hunched behind the couch but for the top of his head. The game has one purpose only, and that is for the father and his child to know joy. 

Let me give you two examples, one, an energized symbol, and the other, an energized sorrow. 

When I was a boy, my father placed the image of an eagle over my bedroom door. It was part of a decorative theme of Americana. (My lamp was the statue of a minuteman.) Later, with a lot of encouraging support from my parents, I became an Eagle scout. Later, I became the high school  mascot, dressing up as a falcon for football and basketball games, rallying the wide spectrum of people gathered there. Still later, while serving friends in Turkey, a mysterious visitor showed me a journal with an eagle on it. “You are my eagle,” He said. Then He left. 

You get the point. Wings kept showing up.

For you, it might be a recurring statement, not a symbol. It might be a question or a way you solve problems. It might be a person. Here’s an example not from when I was at my best, but at my worst.

In 2015, I ruined an opportunity to obtain a PhD in English literature. I had unusual favor and irreplaceable mentors. I also had five digits of debt, five children, part time jobs, and spotty income. I had an opportunity to earn a bit more in the English Department. But I did not have time to earn it. So I embezzled it. (“I’ll work for it later,” I rationalized. “This is just an advance.”)

The accountant caught the ruse. I immediately returned the funds and resigned from the program. In the parting inquiry before the department authorities, I received a well-deserved scouring and reprimand. But two things came of that meeting that remain with me to this day. 

One was a question the gentler of the professors asked me. His voice was fatherly and otherly, as if it had nothing to do with the meeting but had dropped in from some council somewhere else: “Kurt, why do you want a PhD?”

I told him why. And that answer has informed the rest of my life. It is the throughline of all my private study projects and the hoped for fruit in all I write and speak. 

The other thing that remained was a friend, a colleague in my student cohort, Aaron Cassidy, now Dr. Cassidy at the Cambridge School of Dallas, who perceived potential in my writing. If it had not been for his constant exhortation, my mythpoetic literature called The Jaguar Oracle Series would not exist. Everyone who ever reads and benefits from it will have Aaron to thank for recalling it to life after I had abandoned it in despair over the self-sabotage of my PhD.

I call these things—the recurring eagle and the silver lining of my sin—watermark moments. 

Now, a watermark by its nature isn’t obvious. You have to look for it. You have to hold the paper up to the light. But once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. You know it’s there. You know where to look. And you know you have an authentic original in your hands. Something unique and uncopyable. Something that is only yours to steward.

Likewise, as you learn practical methods for recollecting the moments of your life, you are holding it up to the light too. And you will discover the moments that comprise your watermark: those unique—often very small—symbols, statements, and stories that are energized with the message, “This is who you are designed to be, and this is what you are designed to do.”

© Kurt Mähler

P.S. On Thursday, February 19th, 8 p.m. CST, I will host a one-hour webinar exploring this further, offering practical methods you can apply to your own life. Register for the Zoom event here. Limit to first one hundred registrants.

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Footnote

1. The Church Fathers distinguish between (1) God’s essence (Greek: ousia) and (2) God’s energies (Greek: energeia). We know our Lord through His energies, the countless uncreated self-offerings of Himself to us in all creation and in our own lives. Most English Scripture translations—derived from Latin—render energies and energizings as “workings” or “operations.” All of these energizings bear witness to the ultimate act of self-giving love of our Father, an event in a category of its own, where the ousia/energeia distinction falls silent in reverence: the life-giving mystery of the Incarnation. ↩︎