By Ray Blunt

Mention the word calling or vocation, particularly to a Christian, and you uncover for many a raw wound. We are finding that out as different people respond to the name of this organization on the website, in a casual conversation, or when they listen to a talk we might give. The words may differ, but the angst is very similar:

Articles by Ray Blunt >>

I know I'm not doing what God has created me to do, but I cannot figure out what that is supposed to be. I have a good job, but I don't really love it most of the time and I feel I need to make a change. However, I'm afraid either I may never find out what I'm supposed to do until too late and by then my life will have been wasted or I'll make a change and blow it again. How can I know what vocation He has prepared for me? Am I doing something wrong?

Perhaps some of this strikes a cord with you. If so, let's discuss it a bit.

The Great Desire of our Hearts

I am reminded of a Philips Brooks quote I memorized years ago that spoke to something in my heart as a young man:

Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is leading, with the thoughts he is thinking, with the deeds he is doing; when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is still, in spite of all, the child of God.

The way God has wired us it seems we have a belief that there is some purpose He has made us for-"something we were made and meant to do." It sometimes, to me, felt like a deep heart ache. I just knew I was supposed to be a fighter pilot, but after graduating from the Air Force Academy, I flunked the flight physical. What now God? Little did I know that it was all for my own good, but I didn't see that for many years.

Getting sidetracked only to find it was God's good purpose is a perspective I have been able to share with a number of young people who find their first work experience not to be what they had hoped, including my own son. In a set of circumstances much like my own, he was on his way to becoming an officer in the Army and it seemed he was perfectly wired for such a role, but a congenital back weakness stopped that course. In the years since, he has found some success and stability in software development and integration but this is probably not his first love. As he and I have talked, one thing emerges and that is he is far more able to have the time to be the dad and husband that he realizes is true success (far surpassing my example to him) and a calling for each man. And, he also knows that God is in this and is most likely preparing him for another step in widening his purpose--one day.

So how should Christians proceed who have such persistent questions about their calling-- such a heart-deep yearning for their purpose on earth?

God Has a Bigger Stake in This Than We Do

One insight that I have found helpful is to understand that God has a far larger stake in our lives-the whole of our lives--than we do. He has been and is right now working to see that we become what He made us to be; who He made us to be. This is the nature of His character. And this concern He has is for all of our life, not just for our careers.

His view is not as ours so often is-fragmented to the point that career equates with calling. And thus for God there is a weaving together of all of life's experiences, relationships, and choices into who we are being shaped (or reshaped) into becoming. That unfragmented picture and the character and sovereign purposes of God must be where we begin our thinking. But it does not end there. What we do with our ten or twelve hours a day for five or six days a week is more critical to Him than it is to us.

For example, we are told He has plans for us to do work-plans that were prepared from before time. (Ephesians 2:10) It is also clear He directs our steps, even when we have plans of our own. (Proverbs 16:1) We can also be assured that those are good plans (Jeremiah 29:11) and, further, that what He plans and begins He will see through to completion. (Philippians 1:9) A God who dies in our place to redeem us is certainly a God who wants our lives to become all that He desires-not just that we arrive safely in heaven for eternity. And lest we forget it, God, Himself is a worker, right alongside us.

Practically speaking, the things in our lives that make up the sum total of our experiences--good, bad and boring--somehow become a part of preparing us to become what we shall one day be, often when we don't realize it. But a sovereign God is able to take the whole banana-all of our experiences including our failures and sins--and make something wonderful over time. And, of course, that includes the place we are in right now.

Where You Are  

Albert Einstein once received a letter from a brilliant colleague who was deeply dissatisfied with the work he was doing and wanted the renowned scientist to advise him on how he might extricate himself and find another position equal to his talents. Einstein's pithy reply is now part of our common vernacular-"bloom where you are planted." Some of us might even think that's a Bible verse.

Whether it is or not, the thought is biblical but sometimes hard to hear. When I left the Air Force for a career in civilian public service, I soon felt stuck in the bureaucracy. The "bloom where you are planted" idea could sound grating to a young, impatient man, and I most likely would have muttered, "Sure, that's easy for you to say Mr. Future Nobel Prize Winner." And maybe you've heard something like this in your own wrestling with your true vocation.

Such gratuitous advice would seem grating to most of us especially when we are in a job where we feel unfulfilled, dead-ended, bored, or unchallenged. But even if this isn't Scripture, Einstein may have understood something about the way God has ordered the world that we as Christians sometimes don't-or maybe we just forget. He's about more than putting us on the fast track to success. You might even call it the slow track to becoming what he has designed us to be as people. For Moses it was 40 years of sheep and desert. For Jesus it was probably 20 years as a carpenter and builder to prepare for his final calling.

Contentment with our circumstances, and that includes our careers, is something God cares about. Think of the great tribe of Israel whose "job" it was to traverse the desert between Egypt and the Promised Land. They had miraculously escaped from slavery, oppression, and back-breaking work making bricks without straw, and then watched the drowning of their Egyptian oppressors. Nevertheless, the experience of desert hiking without the food they ate in Egypt soon turned to muttering, grumbling, and certainly lack of contentment.

The big picture of how this experience would toughen their faith and their bodies to prepare them for the battles to secure the land flowing with milk and honey eluded them. From brick makers to desert nomads to wealthy farmers as a career path seemed beyond their belief. If you remember the story, God grew tired of their grumbling and their eventual return to the calf gods of Egypt. Consequently a whole generation with a few exceptions like Caleb and Joshua missed out on a good life and satisfying work already waiting for them. Could that be a lesson for us? I think so.

It's a theme Paul also takes up as he draws lessons from his own career in mentoring us and his students along with his young protégé in Philippians 4:11 and in I Timothy 6:6. Here is a man who could have been a highly successful professor or theologian, a member of the inner circle of religious leaders, or maybe even the ultimate achievement-the High Priest. Money, prestige, and a comfortable and peaceful life awaited him at one point. Nevertheless he went through what Bill Hybels calls "the descent into greatness" and subsequently learned to be content in all things like prison, shipwreck, stoning, and hunger. His inspired writings have now been read, memorized, quoted, taught and preached to two millennia of generations and have led millions to faith in Christ. God was using his circumstances where he was to mold his life, character and career into one that would be far more lasting in its impact and far more glorifying to God. He left an unmatched legacy.

In one of the most widely read contemporary books on faith and work, Doug Sherman and Bill Hendricks make the same point-your work today really matters to God. He does not have some hierarchy of jobs in His economy that elevates "full time Christian service" --missionary, pastor, Christian organization worker, then way down in the lower rungs is your job. Plato may have imagined a two-tiered world, but God thinks what you do right now and how you do it and how you approach it and what your attitude is--all these have eternal consequences. But they also have temporal consequences. We are all in full-time Christian service whether it is recognized as such or not and our boss, if you will, is God, himself.

If God has a bigger stake in this than you and I do, then the lessons of today's experience are His preparation for what lies ahead. He doesn't intend that we spend our lives being underutilized or finding our gifts (which are from Him) unused. But just like the children of Israel, let's be aware that there is a bigger game being played out that today's frustrations don't fully depict. What you do today really does matter to God. You'll see.

WASHINGTON INSTITUTE RESOURCES

CONTINUE >