Reflecting on Psalm 16 and the boundary lines God has laid down for us, Anne and John Duddington explore how our calling is not what we might have chosen, but what God has set before us — drawing on Andrew Phang and a famous prayer of Newman.
LORD, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.Psalm 16 5-6 (New International Version)
God has given us all boundary lines: these are the paths laid down for us in this life. Sometimes we grumble at them and wish we were in a different place, or job or time. As Andrew Phang says:
"I wonder how many of us have wondered about how things might have been if only we had been given an opportunity to do something, or how to capitalise on it when it appeared. Often, however, these are mere regrets and a longing or pining after what we would have liked, but what was not, in the final analysis, our calling."1
However, as he says, whatever the world thinks or perceives "the boundary lines have fallen to us in pleasant places" as what God really wants us to do is to love Him and our fellow human beings, and bring the Gospel of eternal life and salvation to them.
Newman spoke of our worldly vocation in a famous prayer2:
God knows me and calls me by my name.…
God has created me to do Him some definite service;
He has committed some work to me
which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission—I never may know it in this life,
but I shall be told it in the next.
Anne and John Duddington
- From Andrew Phang, Keeping faith (Singapore: Genesis Books, 2003) pps. 82-83. Andrew is both a judge in the Singapore Supreme Court and a writer on Christian topics.
- This is the first verse of Some Definite Service, published in 1848.