There was a detour sign on [Calvin’s] road from Paris to Strasbourg. Francis I and Charles V were in the opening stages of their third major war. Armies sprawled across the roads forbade passage. Calvin bent his way southward by Geneva … He went to an inn, planning to spend one restful night and be gone. But … there was knock on the door of Calvin’s chamber, and an importunate caller entered, who felt himself commissioned to remake the scholar into a leader. This was, of course, Guillaume Farel, the venturesome, big-voiced, red-haired little evangelist and controversialist … Farel and his associates were intent on reconstruction [in Geneva] and had taken some significant steps in the ordering of discipline, worship, and education. [W]hen [he found out] that Calvin had come for the night, Farel eagerly sought him out, resolved in to enlist him in the Geneva work.

The interview was both dramatic and historically momentous. Farel was twenty years Calvin’s senior, and a man of flaming zeal. Calvin longed for the library and the study; to Farel this would be a desertion of the cause of the Lord.

“If you refuse,” he thundered, “to devote yourself with us to the work … God will condemn you.”

Calvin later testified that he had been terrified and shaken by Farel’s dreadful adjuration, and had felt as if God from on high had laid His hand upon him.

John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism, pp. 131 – 136

Happy New Year! Don’t let anybody guilt you into any historically significant moves!