Episode
If God's Not Using Me, Am I Useless?
- Podcast
- Heretic Hereafter Podcast
- Published
- Jan 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 201
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://heretichereafter.substack.com/p/being-a-tool-for-god
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Summary
It’s 2026 and I feel completely unprepared. What is this year? What are we doing? After entertaining my kids all through Christmas break, I could use a vacation. But while I’d rather be hibernating and procrasti-baking, life continues apace! In this time of new year’s resolutions and grand plans, I’ve been thinking about purpose —as in, do we all have one? Just one? And who gets to decide such a thing? Answers were simpler before I deconstructed my faith. When I was confirmed, I had to recite answers to the Westminster Catechism including this exchange: Q: “What is the chief end of man?” A: “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Even as an eager-to-please 11-year-old, this answer struck me as fishy. Didn’t people spend their whole lives trying to figure out the meaning of life? Was I just supposed to accept the Westminster Catechism at face value and never seek out the answers for myself? Then, as now, that was very much NOT MY VIBE. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. As I grew older and entered into more Evangelical spaces, capital-P Purpose got further dumbed down. There were worship songs and ranting prayers about being “tools for God” and letting God “use” us. Being used by God was, in that worldview, the best-case scenario. In my Calvinist upbringing, we were taught that humans were inherently evil and incapable of doing good. Ergo, the only way to escape this cycle of evil was to hollow oneself out, become a mere vessel for the will of God. And since we were inherently evil, our intuition couldn’t be trusted; joy was suspect. We couldn’t count on our own feelings to point us towards purpose! Instead, we ought to obey a higher calling—whatever that was. Obedie…