The Power of Calling: From Sacrifice to Social Justice Movements
Throughout history, the power of calling has driven
individuals to make profound sacrifices in the pursuit of justice, freedom, and
social change. From abolitionists who risked their lives to end slavery to
faith-driven leaders who stood against oppression, calling has been a force
that compels action beyond personal comfort.
Whether it was William Wilberforce’s relentless fight
against the slave trade, Yehudi Menuhin’s unwavering dedication to music, or
Will Campbell’s radical call to faith in action, each story reflects a deep
sense of purpose that transcends self-interest.
Social justice movements are often born from such
callings—an inner conviction that refuses to be ignored, inspiring people to
challenge injustice, uplift the marginalized, and reshape history.
Story topics: Faith, Activism, Music, History, Freedom,
Leadership, Sacrifice, Justice, Calling, Inspiration, Resistance, Courage
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1.
Faith in Action: How Le Chambon Sheltered
Innocent Lives
There are two things, it has often been said, that human
beings cannot gaze at directly without going mad – the glory of God and the
darkness of human evil.
After years of studying human cruelty, Philip Hallie,
professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University and a veteran of World War II,
must have felt close to madness. Working on a project on Nazi cruelty, he
focused on the medical experiments Nazi doctors conducted on Jewish children in
the death camps.
“Across all these studies,” Hallie wrote later, “the pattern
of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so
that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetitions of the
patterns of persecution…. My study of evil incarnate had become a prison whose
bars were my bitterness toward the violent, and whose walls were my horrified
indifference to slow murder. Between the bars and the walls I revolved like a
madman … over the years I had dug myself into Hell.”
During this time Hallie came across a short article about a
small town of three thousand in the mountains of southern France, which was the
only safe haven for Jews in all of German-occupied Europe.
Reading with academic objectivity in his effort to classify
types of cruelty and forms of resistance to it, he was about halfway down the
third page of the story when he became “annoyed by a strange sensation on my
cheeks.”
Reaching up to wipe away a piece of dust, he felt tears –
“Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet.” Those tears, Hallie wrote, were
an instinctive “expression of moral praise.”
What Hallie was reading was his introduction to the citizens
of Le Chambon and their heroic rescue of more than five thousand Jewish
children in the Second World War.
Later written up in his modern classic Lest Innocent
Blood Be Shed, Hallie came to realize the rightness of a summary by one of
his readers: “The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And
Le Chambon was the rainbow.” Yes, he concluded, “I realized that for me too the
little story of Le Chambon is grander and more beautiful than the bloody war
that stopped Hitler.”
What emerges in his story is the strands of the stubborn
courage of the Chambonnais. They were Huguenots, French Protestants fired by
their faith in Christ and the experience of three hundred years of persecution
following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
And they were led, taught, and encouraged by their
indomitable pastor, Andre Trocme, and his equally heroic wife, Magda. But what
comes across repeatedly is their character and the down-to-earth, no-nonsense
quality of their faith.
Many French let themselves be deceived by the infamous
“night and fog” propaganda with which the Germans concealed the death camps.
But the Chambonnais simply did what had to be done, what they’d been taught to
do, what Christ would have expected them to do – they sheltered and saved their
neighbors, the Jews, who were in danger.
The evening Pastor Trocme himself was arrested illustrates
the whole story. The pastor and his wife had been invited to dinner by church
members who, knowing they often forgot such invitations, sent their daughter to
remind them.
But when she entered the dining room, she saw the police
arresting her pastor. So the word flew around the village: Andre Trocme had
been arrested.
Typically, however, Magda Trocme invited the two policemen
to have dinner with them. Friends were later incredulous and upset with her.
“How could you bring yourself to sit down to eat with these men who were there
to take your husband away, perhaps to his death? How could you be so forgiving,
so decent to them?”
Madame Trocme always gave the same answer: “What are you
talking about? It was dinner-time; they were standing in my way; we were all
hungry. The food was ready. What do you mean by such foolish words as
‘forgiving’ and ‘decent’?”
Such a response was typical. The Chambonnais shrugged off
praise again and again. They would look Hallie in the eye and say, “How can you
call us ‘good’? We were doing what had to be done. Things had to be done,
that’s all, and we happened to be there to do them.
You must understand that it was the most natural thing in
the world to help these people.” An outsider’s words of moral praise, Philip
Hallie concluded, are “like a slightly uncomfortable wreath laid upon a head by
a kind but alien hand.”
Source: Os Guinness. The Call: Finding and
Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Kindle edition. Locations
1092-1095).
2.
The Boy Who Knew: Yehudi Menuhin’s
Passion for the Violin
Yehudi Menuhin, the renowned maestro and violinist, has held
audiences all over the world spellbound with his conducting and virtuoso
playing.
Like many great musicians, his gifts were precocious. He
made his violin debut in San Francisco at the age of seven and launched his
worldwide career at the age of twelve with a historic concert at Carnegie Hall.
In his memoirs, Unfinished Journey, Menuhin tells the story of
how he began his long love affair with the violin.
From the time he was three years old, Menuhin’s parents
frequently took him to concerts in New York where he heard the concertmaster
and first violinist Louis Persinger. When Persinger broke into solo passages,
little Yehudi, sitting with his parents up in the gallery, was enchanted.
“During one such performance,” Menuhin wrote, “I asked my parents if I might
have a violin for my fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach me to play
it.”
Apparently, his wish was granted. A family friend gave the
little boy a violin, but it was a toy one, made of metal with metal strings.
Yehudi Menuhin was only four. He could hardly have had the
arms and fingers to do justice to a full-sized violin, but he was furious. “I
burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing to do with it.”
Reflecting years later, Menuhin said he realized he wanted nothing less than
the real thing because “I did know instinctively timely that to play was to
be.”
Source: Os Guinness. The Call: Finding and
Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Kindle Locations
509-511). Kindle Edition.
3.
From Bookstore to Parliament: The Long
Road to Emancipation
At the close of the eighteenth century the slave trade was a
thriving and very big business. Prominent families held slaves and interests in
the slave business, a vast swathe of people depended on slavery for their
livelihoods, and public opinion was undisturbed by it. When Clarkson threw in
his lot with a small group of Quakers in opposition to the trade the odds of
success were seemingly impossible.
On May 22, 1787 Clarkson and about a dozen others met in the
James Phillip Bookstore for the first official meeting of the Committee of the
Slave Trade. They devised a strategy to gather intelligence on the trade,
expose it’s inhumanity via pamphlets, posters and public lectures, and build
momentum for a banning of the British slave trade.
Clarkson became their only full time anti-slavery
campaigner. He travelled tirelessly throughout England seeking to gather
intelligence on the slave trade and to draw people’s attention to its cruelty
and inhumanity.
The task was incredibly difficult. Few of those involved in
the slavery business would talk to him; he received death threats, and at least
one attempt on his life; many mocked him. In that first year he noted
I began now to tremble, for the first time, at the arduous
task I had undertaken, of attempting to subvert one of the branches of the
commerce of the great place which was then before me…. I questioned whether I
should even get out of it alive.
Yet the tide of opinion began to turn. Petitions containing
thousands of names started to find their way to Parliament.
More people joined themselves to the cause, including the
potter Josiah Wedgewood, who crafted a relief of a kneeling slave with the
words “Am I not a man and a brother?” that became a popular and influential
adornment, and parliamentarian William Wilberforce, who championed the cause in
Parliament. Hundreds of thousands stopped using sugar, the major slave produced
good in England, and slave-free sugar started appearing.
The autobiography of freed slave Olauda Equiano became a
best seller and many heard him speak.
Within five years of that first meeting at the James Phillip
bookstore public opinion had turned against the slave trade. Parliament however
would take longer to conquer. William Wilberforce was the spearhead of the
parliamentary campaign.
So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the trade’s
wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let
the consequences be what they would; I from this time determined that I would
never rest until I had effected its abolition
Like Clarkson, Wilberforce met with fierce opposition and
derision. Admiral Horatio Nelson for example, condemned “the damnable doctrine
of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies”. He also found the support of
colleagues such as the Prime Minister, William Pitt.
Bills against the trade were moved in 1791, 1792, 1793,
1797, 1798, 1799, 1804, and 1805, all without success, until on February 27,
1807 a bill for the abolition of the slave trade passed the House by a vote of
283 to 16.
The anti-slavery activists had assumed that once the
shipping of slaves was outlawed slavery would collapse. This assumption proved
naive.
While no more slaves were shipped, slaves continued to be
held on British owned plantations in the West Indies and their children
enslaved. This set off continued campaigning. A mass uprising of slaves in 1831
signalled the oppression of slaves was no longer sustainable, and in 1833 the
Emancipation Act finally saw the end of British slavery.
It took fifty-six years, but who’d have thought that from
that meeting of a dozen people in the James Phillip Bookstore on May 22, 1787,
armed with nothing but their determination and their voices, would issue such a
result?
4.
Reflecting Light into Dark Places
During the Second World War, German paratroopers invaded the
island of Crete. When they landed at Maleme, the islanders met them, bearing
nothing other than kitchen knives and hay scythes. The consequences of
resistance were devastating.
The residents of entire villages were lined up and shot.
Overlooking the airstrip today is an institute for peace and
understanding founded by a Greek man named Alexander Papaderous. Papaderous was
just six years old when the war started. He home village was destroyed and he
was imprisoned in a concentration camp. When the war ended, he became convinced
his people needed to let go of the hatred the war had unleashed.
To help the process, he founded his institute at this place
that embodied the horrors and hatreds unleashed by the war.
One day, while taking questions at the end of a lecture, Papaderous was
asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” There was nervous laughter in the room. It
was such a weighty question. But Papaderous answered it.
He opened his wallet, took out a small, round mirror and
held it up for everyone to see. During the war he was just a small boy when he
came across a motorcycle wreck. The motorcycle had belonged to German soldiers.
Alexander saw pieces of broken mirrors from the motorcycle lying on the ground.
He tried to put them together but couldn’t, so he took the largest piece and
scratched it against a stone until its edges were smooth and it was round. He
used it as a toy, fascinated by the way he could use it to shine light into
holes and crevices.
He kept that mirror with him as he grew up, and over time it
came to symbolise something very important. It became a metaphor for what he
might do with his life.
I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and
shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into
the dark places of this world–into the black places in the hearts of men–and
change some things in some people.
Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am
about. This is the meaning of my life.
Robert Fulgham, It Was On Fire When I Laid Down On
It
5.
Patrick’s Calling: The Slave Who Changed
a Nation’s Destiny
At the turn of the 5th century the Roman Empire was on the
verge of collapse. With its power crumbling, the coast of Britain was subject
to attacks by violent Irish slave traders.
In 401 a 16-year-old boy named Patrick was taken in one of
these raids. Stripped from the comforts of his home life and a future which
would have included a classical education and career, Patrick was made the
slave of an Irish chieftain and assigned the role of shepherd.
The life of a shepherd-slave was miserable – isolated for
months on end in mountains that were bitterly cold, in a land where he did not
know the local languages, and experiencing times of severe hunger.
Such severe circumstances drove the young man to God. His
grandfather had been a Christian priest, and Patrick turned to his family’s
faith. He spent his bitter days in constant prayer.
As he did, a deep love of God and a profound sense of God’s
Spirit at work within him grew in the young man.
Six years after his kidnapping Patrick had a dream-vision.
In his sleep he heard a voice say “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going
home.” He sat up, startled, and the voice continued: “Look, your ship is
ready.” Patrick got up and started walking.
Two hundred miles later he came to the coast and saw a ship.
No ship was about to give passage to a fugitive slave and the captain told the
young man to move on.
But Patrick knew this was his ship. He spent some time in
prayer and before he had finished one of the sailors came after him with the
message that he could sail with them.
It takes him two years but finally the young man arrives
home to Britain. His overjoyed parents beg him not to ever leave them again.
But one night Victorious, a man who he knew in Ireland, appears to him in a
vision. Victorious holds a letter with the heading “The Voice of the Irish”.
The young man then hears a voice of a multitude crying “We
beg you to come and walk among us once more.”
Try as he might Patrick cannot put the Irish out of his
mind. The visions keep coming until finally he gives in. He enrolls to be
trained for the ministry and emerges sometime later an ordained priest and
bishop. And so a young bishop by the name of Patrick heads off to become the
first known missionary to Ireland. His mission is astonishingly successful.
The Irish rapidly embraces the Christian faith. By the time
of his death Christianity has been established across Ireland, the Irish slave
trade has ended, and murder and inter-tribal warfare have markedly
decreased.
One of Patrick’s greatest achievements was the salvation of
Western civilisation. After the “barbarians” overran the Roman Empire nearly
all the great literary works were destroyed.
Hundreds of years of learning literally went up in flames.
But there was a place the Latin books were copied and preserved – in the
monasteries established by Patrick throughout Ireland. When Europe emerged from
its Dark
Ages it was to the monasteries of Ireland that they turned to recover their
learning.
Source: Reported in Thomas Cahill, How the Irish
Saved Civilisation (Hodder, 1995)
6.
Stop Selling Sugared Water
Who among us could live without computers? It seems they’re
everywhere – in our studies at home, on our desks at work, in the library, the
bank and even the cafe. We get pleasure from them, we swear at them, we need
them.
But it’s only a recent thing. Just 3 generations ago the
Chairman of IBM declared there is a world market for only five computers. As
recently as 1977 the President of Digital Equipment claimed there is no reason
anyone would want a computer in their home!
The revolution was brought to us in large part by Steven
Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers. Steve Jobs was just 21 when he and Steve
Wozniak invented the Apple Computer. Until then computers were a monstrous mass
of vacuum tubes which took whole rooms. Then the two Steve’s managed to take
that mass of tubes and incorporate them inside a box small enough to sit on a
desk.
Jobs and Wozniak offered their invention to Atari. They
weren’t interested in big bucks – all they wanted was a salary and the
opportunity to continue their work. Atari knocked them back. They offered it to
Hewlett-Packard, but Hewlett Packard knocked them back. It seemed Jobs and
Wozniak alone could see the possibilities.
So, Jobs sold his Volkswagon and Wozniak sold his
calculator, and with the $1300 that gave them they formed Apple Computers. The
company was named Apple in memory of a happy summer Jobs had spent working in
an orchard.
The rest is history. By all accounts Steve Jobs is a
visionary, and spurred on by that vision he built a successful computer
company. But Jobs soon discovered that if his vision was to reach fruition they
needed greater management expertise.
So, Jobs approached John Sculley, then President of PepsiCo.
There was absolutely no reason why Sculley should leave a highly paid position
in a world leading company to go work with a bunch of computer nerds in a
fledgling industry. Not unsurprisingly he turned Jobs down. But Jobs wouldn’t
take no for an answer. He approached Sculley again.
Again, Sculley turned him down. In a last-ditch effort Jobs
passionately presented his visionary ideas to Sculley and he asked Sculley a
question that forced him to accept. The question was this: “Do you want
to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to
change the world?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared
water or do you want a chance to change the world?” Indeed, Jobs and Sculley
did change the world.
Jesus comes to us with the same question: “Do you want to
spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to
change the world?” Most of us spend our lives making sugared water, going to
work to accumulate more possessions and perhaps finding space for God and the
world in our spare time. But Jesus had a vision to change the world.
His was the vision of the kingdom of God and he calls us to
place it at the center of our lives, to make it our reason for existence
(Matthew 6.33).
Source: information on Jobs and Sculley from
“silicon_valley_story” and “ideafinder” websites.
7.
Henry of Bavaria
In the eleventh century King Henry III of Bavaria grew tired
of court life and the pressures of being a monarch. He made an application to
Prior Richard at a local monastery, asking to be accepted as a contemplative
and spend the rest of his life in the monastery.
“Your majesty” said Prior Richard, “Do you understand that
the pledge here is one of obedience? That will be hard because you have been a
king.”
“I understand” said Henry. “The rest of my life I will be
obedient to you, as Christ leads you.”
“Then I will tell you what to do”, said Prior Richard. “Go
back to your throne and serve faithfully in the place where God has put you.”
When King Henry died, a statement was written: “The king
learned to rule by being obedient.”
Source: told in Leadership Magazine, Fall 1985.
8.
Finding Jesus Beyond Church: A Challenge
to Comfortable Christianity
Will Campbell was a Baptist minister and civil rights
activist and award-winning author, based in Mississippi in the 1960’s and 70’s.
Campbell’s prophetic ministry earned him death threats and opposition as well
as helping others gain insight into what it truly means to be a follower of
Jesus.
As a Baptist Will was familiar with the practise of the
altar call, where people are invited to indicate a response to Christ by
walking to the front of the church and being prayed for.
Yet in a sermon Campbell once turned the idea of the altar
call on it’s head. “I hope that someday there will be an evangelistic service
in which, when the preacher gives the invitation and people start coming down
the aisle, he yells back at them, ‘Don’t come down the aisle! Go to Jesus!
Don’t come to me! Go to Jesus!'” said Campbell.
“Upon that declaration, the people who were coming down the
aisle turn around and exit the auditorium and get in their cars and drive away.
He then yells at the rest of the congregation, ‘Why are you
hanging around here? Why don’t you go to Jesus too? Why don’t you all go to
Jesus?’ The people rise en masse and quickly leave the church, and soon the
parking lot is empty.”
“What I imagine is that about a half hour later the
telephone at the police station starts ringing off the hook, and the voice at
the other end says, ‘We’re down here at the old-folks’ home and there’s some
crazy people at the door yelling that they want to come in and visit Jesus, and
I keep telling them Jesus isn’t in here! All we have in here is a bunch of old
ladies who are half dead. But they keep saying, “But we want to visit Jesus! We
want to visit Jesus!” ‘
“The next call is from the warden down at the prison. He’s
saying, ‘Send some cops down here! There’s a bunch of nuts at the gate and
they’re yelling and screaming, “Let us in there! We want to visit Jesus! We
want to visit Jesus!” I keep telling them that all we have in this place are
murderers, rapists, and thieves. But they keep yelling, “Let us in! We want to
visit Jesus!” ‘
“No sooner does the cop at the desk hang up the phone than
it rings again. This time it’s the superintendent of the state hospital calling
for help. He’s complaining that there are a bunch of weird people outside
begging to be let in. They, too, want to see Jesus! The superintendent says, ‘I
keep telling them Jesus isn’t here. All we have here are a bunch of nuts, but
they keep yelling at us, “We want to see Jesus.”
Source: Biographical information from University of Southern
Mississippi website. Sermon reported in Tony Campolo, Let Me Tell You A
Story
9.
Black Robe
Bruce Beresford is one of Australia’s most successful film
directors. Among his more widely known movies are Breaker Morant and Driving
Miss Daisy.
But one of the most difficult films he has ever made
was Black Robe. It told the story of French Jesuit missionaries
working among the Indians of Quebec.
The bitterly cold winter weather of Saguenay-Lac St Jean
created a logistics nightmare.
But Beresferd’s greatest challenge was not the
weather nor accuracy of historical portrayal. It was in making the priest’s
missionary obsession believable to film-goers today. According to Beresferd:
“He had an obsession with getting people into heaven. This is a concept few
people these days take seriously. My job was to convince an audience that this
is important.”
Source: interview with Beresferd at signis.net