What is vocation? What is calling? Both are such broad terms they could fill an entire canvass with a faint beige – you know it’s there, but can’t really see it.
I really struggled out of college trying to find my “calling” and my life’s vocation, a search that kept ending in frustration and dead-ends. It seemed my calling was a box full of jagged puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together.
But over the course of this last year, now four years since I walked that graduation stage, I’m realizing that “vocation does not come from willfulness, it comes from listening” (Parker Palmer). Vocation comes from understanding what the everyday details of our lives are shouting. Vocation is so much larger than a job, more complex than a title, more intrinsic than a name that someone else gives us. Vocation is not based on a job, it is based on our deeply rooted identity; on a specific name that was woven into the fabric of our being from before we were even a blip on our mother’s radar (Jeremiah 1:15).
CALLING AND VOCATION DEFINED
To live our vocation, is to live an intrinsic calling that transcends circumstance. “Experiencing and living by a calling provides a fundamental orientation to everyday life” (Banks and Stephens). We must reorient our ideas that calling is only met through a specific activity or role in this world. Our calling will include roles and activities, yes, but it is so much greater, fuller, and richer. Calling and vocation is your entire life, not just a portion of it.
Fulfilling our callings does not need to be grandiose to be worth meeting. It does not need to be saving millions of lives to be worthy of our efforts. The best-served vocation is simply where “your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meets” (Buechner). A simple definition, yet so complex in this increasingly changing and moving world.
To begin down the path of vocation we must begin by asking the right questions of ourselves, to discover the right answers. We must tell ourselves the truth of whom we are, and who we are not, if we are to live out the freeing reality of our true life’s vocation. A job can’t answer these questions for you or me.
MY LIFE’S CALLING
Therefore here’s my calling. To be a man who lives with passion from his passion, inhaling God’s breath to breathe into others through my words, my writing, my leadership, my influence, my time, my resources, my prayers, and my whole being; a breath as powerful and life-giving as giving someone mouth to mouth.
In whatever job, no matter how mundane or grandiose, in whatever niche I occupy on this Earth, this is my calling.
What’s your calling?
Any ideas?
2 Comments
What a fabulous post, Paul. Really, it’s one of your best. I love the Bonhoeffer quote. You used it in just the right place to make your point.
I think my vocation is something along the lines of being here on earth to encourage and offer new perspective–through the verbal and written word. I dunno–it makes more sense in my own head than on screen.
@Lesley – Thanks for the encouragement and for offering us a definition to your calling. It’s such a hard thing to define, especially since I’ve mostly thought of calling as an outcome, not as a way to live life throughout the details. It’s been a freeing revelation, but a tough definition to make tangible. It took me a lot of time, silence, reflection, and prayer to fully understand mine. I’m sure our definitions will grow, but this is a start.