How I can tell if God is calling

I'm feeling a bit reflective today. So this is less explicitly parable and metaphor and more  theological musing. 

Several folks at church have shared with me that they suspect God is calling them to a particular ministry. It's not mine to share what they are hearing. It's theirs, and if the call persists, they'll each test it in the wider congregation and we'll seek fuller guidance together.

What's so remarkable to me is also not the ministries themselves—even though they are remarkable—but that in the busy lives we lead any of us can hear the low whisper of God's call. I'm convinced God does call us. But I'm not sure we all hear that call the same. "Tune my heart to sing thy praise," an old hymn goes. Our hearts are tuned differently, based on our embedded ideas of God.

My embedded theology, that is, my ideas of God that go deeper than conscious thought, the assumptions I live with day-in and day-out and make sense of my experience, begin with something so simple I don't even know if I could make an argument for it: God calls us to love and justice. 

We each have some sort of ground-level assumptions we use to make sense of everything else. These are mine. I would doubt a nudge to be from God if it led me toward something unloving or unjust. If, on the other hand, it leads me toward love and justice, then even if the path is rocky and the mountain steep, I have to pay attention.

I bring this up because I might be tempted to test the call by measuring it with someone else's stick. I might, for example, decide something is from God based on whether or not there are obstacles in the path. I've heard some say that they know a particular path is from God because all obstacles fall away,and if there are stumbling blocks, it's God telling them it's the wrong path. But I don't buy it.

There's not a person in scripture whose call made their path easy. For most it made it more dangerous. I'm hard-pressed to find many outside of a few warrior-judges and kings who didn't call people to create a fairer, more just, more faithful and loving community. 

What about you? What are your ground-level, embedded ideas of God, the ones all the others depend on? And how do they help you discern if you hear God call?