Here at our home on the campus of Concordia Seminary St Louis today is Call Day.  It is a day when the approximately 100 or so candidates for pastoral and deaconess ministry receive their first congregational calls - the culmination of four years of study and practice and the confirmation of an inward call that they felt quite a while back that led them to seek training for the ministry.

The process of formation and of waiting leading up to the commencement of the call can feel difficult.  However, if we stop looking forward so much and pay attention to what God is doing in our lives right now, what He is teaching in our lives right now, how are struggles right now and forming us more and more to be the people who He calls us to be - it just changes things so much.  Every day and moment lived and breathed and worked and struggled through is an event that God is sovereign over and used by Him to form us.  I have especially needed that message these last few weeks and I thank God for helping me to see it.

Congrats to the brothers receiving their first calls today as well as the vicars getting their assignments and the deaconesses theirs.  And may the Lord bless us all as we serve in the calling He has placed us in right now whatever and wherever it may be.