How Do I Find My Vocation?
POST BY MATT MCCOY
6 minute read
How do I find my vocation?
What is the vocation of the Church?
What is my family’s vocation?
Often, when I hear people talk about vocation, I hear people talk about “using their gifts” within the context of work. If someone is feeling particularly satisfied in their job, if they’re achieving a certain level of contentment, mastery, sense of purpose, and/or financial stability, they might say something like, “I’ve found my calling,” or “I’ve found my vocation.” And, inversely, if someone’s job feels unsatisfying, juvenile, purposeless, and/or under-compensated, they might say something like, “I just haven’t found my calling yet.”
Let’s apply this line of thinking to the story of Ruth (spoiler alert: Ruth disrupts this line of thinking).
Ruth worked as a gleaner (chapter 2), living meal to meal gathering leftover grain to avoid starvation for herself and her bitter mother in law. Like, that was her job. She heads out to the fields just like other field workers, she had a lunch break where she gets to hang out with the boss, she heads home at the end of the work day.
Was her job as caretaker for a bitter mother-in-law satisfying (2:2)?
Was she particularly gifted at picking up leftover heads of grain off the ground (2:7)?
As a poor, immigrant widow, was she achieving mastery at beating out the barley at the end of the day (2:17)?
Ruth simply didn’t have the luxury, privilege, or freedom to ask any of these questions. She had to find something to eat or she and Naomi were going to die of starvation.
Similarly, the world is full of people who do not have the luxury, privilege, or freedom to ask any of these questions. When I look at my uncommon friends, I realize that if my understanding of vocation doesn’t apply to them, well, then it probably doesn’t apply to me, either. The world is full of people who, like Ruth, have to work very hard just to survive.
Art by Sandra Rast
And, hey, there’s a familiar thread here. Remember those blog posts from the recent past about discipleship and doing the dishes? If not, you can find them here.
Frequently, when someone quits their job to care for a newborn baby, I hear that person say something about feeling like they’ve lost their sense of vocation, calling, self-worth and/or identity. The same is true of people caring for elderly parents, and feeling consumed with the effort, and feeling like their life is on hold. Americans, it seems, are not very good at equating “caring for another human” and “vocation.” Ruth stands in stark contrast, pointing us in the direction Jesus is walking in, which is a radically different direction.
OK, where to go next?
I need a better definition of vocation, so that our common discipleship of living out our vocation can be something that all of my uncommon friends can do together, as we go about our everyday lives.
Let’s renew our imaginations by starting with a trip to the dictionary.
When I look up the word “vocation” in the dictionary, I find a rather basic definition: “The work in which a person is employed.” I also find a more robust definition that captures our imagination a little bit better: “A summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action. Especially: A divine call to the religious life.”
I find a similar rhythm, one definition is basic and the other definition evokes the divine, when I look up the word “calling” in the dictionary:
The reason why these two definitions are so similar is because they have the same root word, “Vocare,” which is the Latin word meaning “to call.”
This is where we get words like vocal chords, vocalists, and other synonyms related to your (wait for it) voice. We’ve been using this therm to describe one’s occupation since the 1550’s [1], so it’s rather firmly entrenched in our imagination to refer to our work.
What isn’t firmly entrenched in our imagination is whose vocal chords are doing the calling. But when we go back to the dictionary, we find a reminder of who is calling to us as we pursue our work: the divine.
Jesus’ vocal chords are calling us.
Sit with that for a little bit.
Jesus has vocal chords.
While we may wonder what Jesus’ vocal chords sounded like when Jesus was on earth, we have spent quite a bit of time learning how to listen to Jesus’ vocal chords in the here and now. Let’s review some of the ways we’ve been exploring how to listen to the voice of Jesus:
The fourth miracle of pentecost is still happening today.
Prayer is still happening today.
We’ve explored different ways to hear the voice of God
And we’ve explored what to do when God’s voice is hard to hear
So our vocation doesn’t come from ourselves. Our calling isn’t something we create, make, or build on our own. Neither is our vocation dependent on feeling satisfied, achieving mastery, or using our gifts.
Our vocation is something that we receive. God gives us our vocation. When I read the story of Ruth, I read about a woman who was willing to risk homelessness to care for her mother-in-law (1:16-17), and who followed God’s leading so completely that Boaz recognized she was living out the Abrahamic covenant (2:11-12). The story doesn’t give us a step-by-step, “here’s how to follow God” directions on how Ruth did it. The story just shows us that she did. She made a covenant with Naomi, and she committed herself to the people in Bethlehem, and she received her vocation from God as she lived out her everyday life being committed to those people.
Our vocation is something that we receive in community. Feel free to reread that last paragraph, and notice that her vocation was woven together with those uncommon friends. Our vocation is not something we pursue on our own, our vocation is given to us by God in our neighborhoods.
With this in mind, I’d like to put forward a new definition for vocation. A definition that recognizes that we receive our vocation, and that is big enough to include uncommon friends who don’t have the privilege of thinking about personal fulfillment or occupational mastery:
That definition feels simple enough, right? But anyone who thinks this is easy needs to go ask Ruth about it, and she’ll set you straight tout suite.
The obvious question, in response to this simple definition of vocation, is “OK, God, what are you already doing? I’ll go participate in that.” And if it seems that God’s voice is hard to hear, well, Ruth is a GREAT story to read about how to live when God’s voice is hard to hear. And Ruth demonstrates something that should feel familiar, yet challenging.
Some days our vocation is hard to figure out, because it’s hard to discern what God is doing so we can participate in that. And on those days, we know that God is loving the people around us (including ourselves), so our vocation is to give and receive love to the people around us.
As a woman in Moab, she didn’t know what she was signing up for when she married that Hebrew boy. As a widowed immigrant in Bethlehem, her vocation was deeply shaped by the complete lack of options available to her. She made a covenant with Naomi that she was going to care for her, and so her vocation HAD TO include living out that covenant.
But if she defined her vocation as something like, “I am feeling fulfilled as I use my gifts towards economically sustainable employment for me,” then her life is a total wreck. But rather than her life becoming a total wreck, her life is our example to follow. As I mentioned in an earlier blog (FIND IT HERE), God often uses people who are invisible to us to help us walk in the direction God is walking in, and Ruth is showing us what it means to be a disciple and live out our vocation. So let’s try to follow her lead.
If vocation is “participating in what God is doing,” then what is God doing, and how does Ruth participate in that? Ruth’s vocation doesn’t involve occupational mastery, she doesn’t pursue personal fulfillment, and she isn’t using her gifts as we would understand it. God is loving Naomi, so Ruth loves Naomi, too. God is loving Ruth, so Ruth allows Boaz and his work crew to be kind to her, too. Ruth participates in the way God is caring for the people around her, including herself, as a way of living out her vocation.
So our vocation is to give and receive love to the people around us, especially on the days when God’s voice is hard to hear, because our vocation is “participating in what God is doing.”
Let me illustrate with two examples.
First, when a person enters into recovery at the Lighthouse Mission, one of the first things they’re given is “work therapy.” Each person is assigned a task to help out the recovery house, and that’s their “work.” Doing the laundry. Cleaning the bathrooms. Helping cook the meals. Taking out the trash. Using Ruth as a guide, I would say that their vocation is discovering how to participate with what God is doing through giving and receiving love with the people around them, through working on the tasks necessary for the community to flourish. Taking out the trash isn’t a pathway for them to discover learning their vocation, it IS their vocation.
Second, well, I’ve heard this before, and if you’ve been reading this blog awhile, then you might remember “My Normal Life and My Great Commission Life are the Same Life” series from a few months ago. The blog from that series which most closely connects to Ruth is Part 2, which you can find here. As I reread those blogs today, I’m reminded that my vocation isn’t about going and doing something FOR God while using my gifts, it’s about walking in the direction Jesus is walking in WITH the people around me, as we go about our ordinary, everyday lives.
So if someone stops working because they are caring for an infant, an elderly parent, or someone else who cannot care for themselves, they haven’t “lost their vocation” as Americans tend to think. As Ruth demonstrates, they are finding their vocation, because they are participating in the love that God has for all of us. The time I spend washing dishes (and I NEVER feel called to wash dishes!) isn’t a distraction from my vocation, it’s a vital part of my vocation, because it’s how I care for myself and the people around me.
In the spirit of integrating previous blog material into our imagination around vocation, I’d like to bring out one of my favorite quotes on this topic (featured in a previous blog post here):
“Just as it does for the Church in general….. sharing food becomes the practices by which they come to understand play, friendship, and the common purse. By learning to eat the same food at the same time they learn the gift of bodily presence with one another. By learning to share the attendant pattern of planning, purchasing, preparing, clearing, washing, and putting away they learn the disciplines of partnership.. And by making the family table the place where manners are articulated and rehearsed, they discover what it means to become a new community with a particular vocation.” {2}
FOOTNOTES
1. I love using Etymonline whenever I need to look up the etymology of a word. Not a particularly academic source, I realize. Do you have a favorite etymology resource? I’d love to hear about it! Also, and more importantly, if you have a concern/challenge/disagreement with the way I’ve interacted with the etymology of the word “vocation,” I’d love to hear about that, too.
2. Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 95-96.