Into the Place

Romans 5 begins with a cascade of past-tense verbs that carry stunning present-tense weight. “We have been justified.” “We have obtained access.” “We stand.” Every verb describes something already done, with ongoing, permanent result. Through faith in Jesus Christ, we have been brought into a place of grace in which we now stand. Not visited, not briefly admitted. We stand there. It is our home.

But Romans 5 doesn’t stop with the place of grace. It continues into a second place, one we discover rather than receive. Frederick Buechner’s famous formulation captures it well: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That intersection is different for every person. Tim Chartier, a mathematician trained by mime master Marcel Marceau, calls his work “Mime-matics.” He teaches at a university and at the National Museum of Mathematics. “My greatest gift is in living in these two worlds,” he says. “They’re not separate for me. It’s me. It’s how I operate.” That seemingly unlikely intersection turns out to be exactly where he belongs.

Two cautions are worth naming. Gladness alone is a hobby. A life organized entirely around what delights me curves inward, away from the world, away from others. It may be wonderful, but it is not yet a calling. And hunger alone, giving yourself to what the world needs without any tending to your own joy, is a path toward burnout. It produces exhaustion, resentment, and eventually collapse. The calling lives at the intersection of both: your particular gladness and the particular hunger you can see and cannot ignore.

The security of that first place, the grace in which we stand, makes it possible to seek the second. Because our identity is not at stake, we can take risks. Because our worth is not tied to our productivity, we can experiment and fail and try again. The place God calls you to may not be immediately obvious. You may need to follow what gives you life for a while before the intersection with the world’s need becomes clear. But the starting point is always the same: brought in, by grace, to a place where we now stand. From there, we begin to look outward and discover where we belong.

As we move through this green season, use the following daily questions to help you find your intersection:
– Where today did I feel most alive, and did that gladness last past the moment?
– What hunger did I keep noticing, what ache caught my eye?.