A Journey Worth Taking: Finding Your Purpose in This World

I just began reading Drew's A JOURNEY WORTH TAKING, and I cannot overemphasize how Drew's theological maturity combined with good writing linked to my current life stage. I immediately began blogging about what I was reading and how it dovetailed the biblical theology that I am preaching through in the book of Jonah. Below is my post - a virtual review and thanksgiving for Drew's clarity and skill in writing. ----- I just began reading a phenomenal, enjoyable, easy-reading but theological book titled, "A Journey Worth Taking: Finding Your Purpose in This World." Charles Drew is a pastor in Manhattan who writes after thirty years of pastoring churches in university cities. I found his book for four bucks on clearance at a bookstore - showing that many of the greatest gospel-centered relevant works are unmarketed and unknown. This is one of those. My reading Drew coincides with my sermon prep-work on the Book of Jonah. I am joyously amazed at how the themes of the early verses of Jonah dovetail with the beginning chapters of "A Journey Worth Taking." It was not an intentional undertaking - I just needed a good read in the midst of the chaos. Here is what I stand amazed to see: Jonah was a weak man who fled the presence of the Lord when he did not like the call of God to go to Nineveh. I am a weak man who wanders and sometimes runs from the gospel of God himself when I do not like how life and churchplanting and ME are too hard to figure out. THEN, in winsome gentleness, Charles Drew writes about the CALLING OF GOD that gives purpose to all of our weak and broken lives. For all of God's children, there is the primary call to God and people, the secondary call to a faithful and joyful expression of who we are as our very selves, and the tertiary call of God to service (to certain tasks and duties that, in a fallen world, simply need to be done). From the beginning, Drew enjoyably makes it clear that the gospel (for weak people caught in the quagmire of our own survival, self-definition and sin) is about a Caller who is our Creator who created us to only know purpose according to his call! AND... his call is first and foremost to himself and to others (to relationship not task), secondly to `be ourselves' as he created us uniquely, and thirdly to be agents of service in a broken world... But it is sad that much of the misery in my life occurs when I mix and match and confuse my primary, secondary and tertiary callings! Thank you for the simple diagnosis Mr. Drew!!! It is so clear - When I live life such that my primary calling is to figure my own identity out (secondary calling) - miserable. When I live life such that my primary calling is to conquer a task or job (tertiary calling) - miserable. Drew makes it plain that we are called by the God of the universe to himself - nothing parallels or should ever supplant that!!! And yet, my pain in life comes when I define myself by any other calling! This is where Jonah shows us the

It seems to me that very few people today seek to understand life's big picture. We live our day-to-day lives happily on the whole, but often disconnected from any wider understanding of life; free from any true sense of a wider meaning or purpose. When considering this fact author Charles Drew says, "We are free to be ourselves, but we are fuzzy about who we are and how we fit in with what is going on around us. We lack vision, in other words, and because we lack vision we lack the passion we need to cut our way through the inevitable setbacks and frequent dullness in whatever we have set out to do. In the absence of a story that connects us to what is going on around us (and to other people), life grows lonely and its purpose often shrinks down to the hollow and even frantic pursuit of whatever pays the biggest dividends (emotionally, spiritually, or materially)." To address this fuzziness, this lack of vision, Drew wrote a book he called A Journey Worth Taking. It is a book that addresses the universal human quest for meaning or what some would term calling. A Journey Worth Taking is, quite simply, a book about living. It is a book about calling, about meaning and about worldview. It is an attempt to provide a framework around which we can understand life. Drew, a Presbyterian pastor who serves Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, writes in a way that is relevant but Scriptural, up-to-date with the culture, but always dependent upon the ancient Scriptures. And what a grand combination this is. Drew clearly has his finger on the pulse of the culture and is able to speak its language, even while remaining faithful to Scripture. He is able to use terminology that the culture will understand, but to do so while giving those terms biblical meaning and import. The book is built around four great ideas, all of which are drawn from the Bible. They are: * Human life comes with built-in purpose. * Something goes wrong with how we express our purpose. * What gets ugly and destructive can be remade beautiful and right. * What we do matters, because we are going somewhere. These big ideas are otherwise known as creation, fall, redemption and consummation and through the book's 270 pages, Drew moves very deliberately through these ideas. He distinguishes between three levels of calling. In our primary calling, God calls us to Himself and to other people. Second, He calls us to self-discovery--to understanding and expressing who He has called us to be. And third, He calls us to serve in this world--to just do the things in this world that need to be done. We can only truly understand any sense of calling when we first understand that there is One who calls and that we are called first and foremost to know and to glorify Him. These levels of calling are examined through the biblical grid and are shown to provide a way that we can understand how life works. At the end of each chapter he pauses to provide insightful questions for discu