Ostium Catholic

Matthew's call is a genuinely strange career decision if you evaluate it the way most people evaluate career decisions. He had an established position, functioning income, and a system that worked well enough to be worth keeping. Tax collection under Roman occupation was despised work, but it paid, and Matthew had presumably built some competence at it. He had no severance plan, no reference letter, no clear picture of what following an itinerant preacher would actually pay or produce. He got up and left anyway, the same day, without negotiating terms.

Most career advice available to you right now would call that reckless. Do your due diligence. Understand the new role before leaving the old one. Don't make an irreversible decision on incomplete information. None of that is bad advice in general, and this isn't an argument against prudence. But Matthew's story is a useful check against a specific failure mode common at this stage of life: treating the security of a known, functioning position as more important than the value of what you might actually be called toward, simply because the known position is measurable and the calling isn't yet.

Ephesians gives the framework for what he was walking into instead - a body with specific roles, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, each equipping others for real work, each measured out grace according to Christ's gift. Matthew went from managing a ledger of what people owed Rome to becoming, by long tradition, the author of a Gospel read for two thousand years. That's not a smaller outcome than the one he left. It's simply one that couldn't have been evaluated in advance by any normal metric.

Identify one place where you've been treating the safety of a known, functioning situation as more important than a call you actually sense but haven't fully evaluated. You don't have to leave it today. Take one real step toward finding out what it would actually cost to say yes.

Lord, I evaluate opportunities by what I can measure in advance, and calling rarely shows up that way. Give me Matthew's willingness to get up before I've seen the whole plan. Amen.