(This is a guest post from Margie)

D&C 121:40 “…many are called, but few are chosen.”

I heard a story this week. Oprah was talking about one of her early conversations with Maya Angelou. And Maya said to Oprah, “I can see who you are, girl… And what you are is obedient. You are obedient to the call.” I felt the pull of those words as a sensation in my body.

I had taken for granted that the word “obedient” had little but negative connotation for me. I had learned, like many of us here at Wheat and Tares, in a hard school that the price of being an obedient girl (or child, or person of any gender) meant things I couldn’t countenance: cruelty, willful ignorance. By the time I was in my twenties, “obedient” was no longer a badge of honor. I actively distrusted it and those who aspired to it.

So the longing I felt when I heard the word this week took me by surprise.

Maybe it’s because, deep down, I know there is both ease and even virtue in obedience. Life is overwhelming. Choices are hard. In any given situation, like anybody else, I try to make the best choice. But how to choose? So many competing priorities abound, and most choices of any importance at all require real tradeoffs. Do I pick the honest thing? The kind one? Do I pick the thing that hurts the fewest people? The thing that protects the most vulnerable? Do I try to pick the thing that does the most good for the most people, or the thing that prevents the worst actors from enacting their worst impulses?

That is where, for many of us, the “call” comes in. The call is the inner voice that tells us what is most important, our internal guidance system. The thing inside us that knows what is right. In Latter-day Saint theology we might call this the Light of Christ, or for baptized and confirmed members, the gift of the Holy Ghost, but in my experience most people have a call. Oprah described it this way, “It’s leaning into what the forces of life have intended for you and understanding that every choice leads you in the direction of your highest calling if you’re willing to be obedient to it.” That sounds very grand and suitably Oprah (I love her), but for most people I suspect the call is more mundane. It might be an instinct to fairness, or to honesty (honesty is most definitely what calls many non-LDS friends), it might be to freedom. For my parents, it’s the call of the prophets and the institutional Church. Most people, I suspect, have a call.

It took me a long time realize this because I don’t have one. I am not called. When I am faced with a choice where values and priorities conflict, I hear no voices, feel no forces. Like anybody, I tend to favor some virtues (kindness, mercy, patience) over others (justice, urgency, honesty), but I do not hear these preferences as calls. I make the just, urgent and sometimes painfully honest choice just as reliably as I’ll take the kind, merciful, patient path.

When you don’t have a call, what you get instead is a choice: over and over and over. And choices are exhausting. This is why obedience to a truly worthy call is so valuable. The obedient decided to decide, and that’s all there is to it. I think it’s often simpler than that—many hear their calls so clearly, they can’t even point to a moment of conscious decision. “I think I must have been born with a testimony,” I once heard Marjorie Pay Hinckley tell a group of missionaries.

It is painful to choose. Every time you choose, if you’re doing it well, it costs you. It costs you time. It costs you the knowledge of what you’re sacrificing. It costs you the recognition that you might be wrong. It robs you of the certainty of ever being right.

Many are called. But I do wonder how much is truly chosen.

Discussion Questions:

Do you hear the call/ have a call? What is it?

If you aren’t called, do you wish that you were? Explain.

Is there a false binary here? To what extent? Can you be called in some important things but have to choose others?

Is “obedient” a loaded word for you? Why or why not?

Do you think there is value in obedience? Under what circumstances?