Calling is very different from employment. Calling has to do with the most primal issues in any person’s life. It’s the answer to the questions: Who am I and why am I here? Employment, however, is a practical matter. It’s about doing something to generate the resources I need to live. Since we all need food, shelter and clothing, our employment is very important to us, but unless someone is financially unable to retire, most people set a date to retire from their job. Their productive years have passed, and their time for leisure and rest have come. Many look forward to those years as a reward for all their hard work. But calling, because it’s an assignment from God and because it is ultimately about helping people find eternal life, doesn’t have a date at which it stops. We simply do what we’re called to do until we can’t anymore. Of course, there are different “seasons” in everyone’s life, so our calling will be expressed in a variety of ways appropriate to each new season. But the point we need to see is that calling isn’t like employment. It’s not something from which we can retire; it’s who we’ve been created to be; it’s the way we’ve been designed to serve God. And I don’t think it ends even when we die, because when Jesus returns to this planet each of us will be assigned an area of ministry for at least another thousand years (Rev 20:1-6). So, the ministry skills and godly character that are being developed in this age will almost certainly be used in the next. 

As we try to reconstruct what happened to Paul after the Book of Acts ends, whether or not we believe he was released, his example challenges every one of us. He didn’t stop serving Jesus until they killed him. If they arrested him, he preached to his guards; if they confined him to an apartment, he preached to everyone who came to visit; and by the way, it was during those years of confinement in Rome that he wrote the letters we call the “prison epistles”: Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians and Philippians. 

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