Vocation: Why Deliver Mail When All the Homes Have Burned to Ashes?

        Images of tragedy quickly pass through the news cycle, but one image of houses totally incinerated in Santa Rosa, California, remains in my head. We viewed on television the city before and after: homes were totally burned to ashes. All was still. Nothing left. But in one screen image I saw something moving. A U.S. postal truck was driving alone slowly up the street. Why was it going up those streets? It seemed to be making its daily rounds. But there no homes to which to deliver mail. Incredible.  And then more incredible still, I saw the truck stop at a metal mailbox that remained. The carrier put some mail in that box. That was the driver’s job.  Or, in Martin Luther’s terms, that was the carrier’s station, role: to deliver mail.

        How ironic! How horribly ironic. What might that mail carrier have been feeling? How could one even tell which plot of ashes was which? What was the mail carrier’s vocation that day? What was the call to ministry?  Sometimes it is very difficult to discern, particularly in the midst of tragic circumstance.  Some people were incinerated in that ash. But others would be coming back and might need their mail: a pay check, a letter from an insurance company. The U.S. mail service would make other provisions, of course. Many addresses and mailboxes no longer existed. What about the mail carrier’s own house?

        After the tragedies of hurricanes, floods, and fires, Christ lives. As Luther wrote: God’s call lifts us out of our everyday duties but does not take us away from them. Rather, more deeply into them. Through the cross and resurrection, our work becomes calling. In the most tragic, even ironic situations, we need each other to discern our vocations. Christ lives in and through us together. Moving through the ashes, we are never alone.