Before Jeremiah said a single word as a prophet, God told him something unsettling: I knew you before I formed you in the womb. Before you existed, I had already set you apart for this. It’s the kind of statement that sounds comforting until you notice what it actually implies. Jeremiah didn’t apply for the job. He didn’t discern it, discover it, or work his way toward it. He woke up into a calling that had been decided before he had any say in the matter.
His response is the part I find myself returning to. Not gratitude, not resolve. Objection. “Ah, Lord God, I don’t know how to speak. I am only a child.” That’s the whole pitch. Not “I’m unqualified in this specific way” or “here’s my concern about the scope of the assignment.” Just: I am only a child. A plain admission that he didn’t feel remotely ready for what he was being asked to do.
I’ve said some version of that sentence to myself more times than I can count, usually right before something that actually mattered. A conversation I knew I needed to have and kept finding reasons to delay. A decision at work that would cost me something no matter which way I went. A conviction I believed but hadn’t yet said out loud to the one person who needed to hear it. In every case, the honest internal monologue wasn’t “I don’t think this is right.” It was “I am only a child,” dressed up in whatever adult language I could find for it.
What God says back to Jeremiah isn’t reassurance that he’s actually ready. It’s a flat refusal to accept the objection as relevant. Don’t say you’re only a child. You will go to everyone I send you to, and say whatever I command you. There’s no argument about Jeremiah’s qualifications, because his qualifications were never the point. The calling didn’t wait for him to feel sufficient. It just required him to show up and speak.
I think this is where a lot of us get stuck, not on whether we have a calling, but on waiting for the feeling of readiness to arrive before we’ll act on it. We treat competence as a precondition instead of a byproduct. But readiness was never really Jeremiah’s to produce. God tells him plainly what he’s actually being given: presence, and words. Not confidence. Not certainty. Just enough to take the next step, and a promise that he wouldn’t be doing it alone.
None of this makes the calling comfortable. Jeremiah’s assignment includes uprooting, tearing down, destroying, and overthrowing before anything gets built or planted. Whatever you’re set apart to do will probably require you to let go of something first: a friendship, a project, a version of yourself that was easier to maintain than the one you’re being asked to become.
If you’re waiting for the doubt to clear before you’ll trust that the call is real, I don’t think that’s how it works. The doubt was never disqualifying. It might just be what a calling feels like from the inside, right up until the point you go anyway.
(Jer. 1:4-10)
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