Calling in "The Rookie"

Nathan Fillion is one of my favorite actors working today. I don’t catch everything he has been in, but with a list like Buffy, Firefly, and Castle, he tends to make shows that work. So, it was a good bet I was going to check out his latest show, “The Rookie.”

Based on a true story about a man who became a police officer at the age of 40, it is a good mix of action, comedy, and drama. Hopefully it continues to deliver for a long time.

At the end of the pilot episode, there is a dialogue between Fillion’s Officer Nolan and Sargent Grey, who is not a fan of his “mid-life crisis” decision to join the Force.

Grey: “You know why I do this job, Officer Nolan?”
Nolan: “Because you’re a people person?”
Grey: [Chuckles] “No. This job, is my calling. An I have a responsibility to protect it from those who aren’t in awe of it.”
Nolan: “I understand—”
Grey: “Good. Then understand I will haze, harass and humiliate you every chance I get, in the hope that you choose to abandon this misguided quest.”
Nolan: “And if this job actually is my calling?”
Grey: “Then nothing I do to you will matter.”

This reminds me of a quote from Charles Spurgeon regarding my own calling: vocational ministry. In teaching young men who were considering the pastorate, he famously said:

“If any student in this room could be content to be a newspaper editor or a grocer or a farmer or a doctor or a lawyer or a senator or a king, in the name of heaven and earth, let him go his way; he is not the man in whom dwells the Spirit of God in its fullness, for a man so filled with God would utterly weary of any pursuit but that for which his inmost soul pants.”

In other words, if you can do anything else, do it. There are a lot of jobs, but some truly are a calling. Thankless, hard, sometimes dangerous tasks that are not done for the paycheck. Those who are called to those endeavors will do them because of the call alone. And that is the way it needs to be. If the call isn’t there, it can’t really be done.