Vocation.

Six years ago, I rolled onto my back and onto a pencil. Idiotmove for not realizing where my pencils were? Nerd move for carrying around somany pencils that I forget where I put them? Both perhaps?

The graphite tip was sharp enough to jolt into my right shoulder blade, then, it broke off. In the following weeks, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get it out. The damn thing was stuck.

Today, the skin is completely sealed over with barely a bump left. A physical manifestation of my call to writing is wedged stubbornly inside of me.

At Calvin College, we tend to view the call to writing as a vocation. While calling and vocation may evoke similar meanings, they are not the same. Vocation, especially within the religious context, is differentiated by retaining the importance of a career calling combined with the divine direction from God. In other words, vocation is the crux of your passion and God’s direction meeting a world need.

According to Dr. Debra Rienstra, PhD and Professor of English at Calvin College, “Any talk about vocation is predicated on class privilege. Most people in the world do not have the luxury of agonizing over their vocation. But if we realize that ‘maximizing our potential’ is a class-encoded imperative, we can relax.” 

I, for one, feel this pressure. I also think part of why vocation is connected to class privilege is because only certain jobs are seen as more vocational than others. (I mean, come on, do you think any parent wanted their child to go into philosophy rather than engineering?)

You can be called to be a mother, but is it your vocation? And if it counts as a vocation, is it an acceptable stand-alone vocation or must it be supplemented by other vocations? Can your vocation be that of a truck driver? Is there a hierarchy of vocation?

I would argue that yes, there is a cultural hierarchy of vocation.

It is within this hierarchy of vocation that, either consciously or subconsciously, certain vocations are valued more than others. How much is the value of a vocation influenced by the complexity of work that it requires? Is it that we culturally value vocations more that produce a great quantity of work, or is it that we value vocations that produce a great quality of work? And furthermore, whom does the work benefit? Within the Christian perspective, pastors and missionaries are typically perceived as the highest esteemed vocation, being that those jobs require selflessness and spreading God’s Word, serving for others. Perhaps medical jobs are next on the vocational hierarchy, since they're associated with the virtue of service, intellectual status, and a high-paying salary.

If you’re given the privileged opportunity to contemplate vocation as a choice, and you choose to identify with a vocation that is on the lower end of the vocational hierarchy, there then exists palpable cultural pressure to prove the validity and authenticity of your vocation. Engineers, businessmen and women, nurses—they don’t feel the cultural pressure to elaborate as much on why they chose their vocation since those vocations are typically highly valued by culture.

But writers, musicians, philosophers, historians—they often do need to elaborate.

With my vocation of writing, “proving” anything can be difficult. What do people expect, an award-winning novel fresh off the press by graduation?

(A short defense for the vocation of writing is that of valuing story as equipping our reality with meaning, bringing joy, encouraging empathy through complex characters, thought-experiments, and imagining the possibility of what could be and how to get there. I could go on and on.)

As a young Christian entering into adulthood, the concept of vocation is a way of applying a framework to our life, a way of measuring our life's success.

But, the pressure to choose your “true” vocation is not only unrealistic, it’s detrimental.

First, it allows very little room for failure. What if you choose wrong? There’s so much pressure packed onto a single decision! This is problematic because it distrusts God’s creative ability to influence your life, no matter what choices you make. As Creator of the universe, He’s a creative guy, you know.

Second, choosing your “true” vocation implies that you only have one vocation. Just like life seasons, you can go through different seasons of vocation as well.

Third, choosing your “true” vocation implies that you can choose anything and be happy with it. Fulfilling an honorable need that you’re terrible at? I mean, you can choose to go through hell every day if you really want to. But you’d be far more useful to God’s plan by using your gifts and enjoying your work. There are a lot of needs in the world. And you have a lot of God-given gifts. Try something new. He needs you somewhere, but, let’s be honest, probably not there.

Fourthly, vocation isn’t something you decide and then pursue. Rather, it’s revealed over time. You try something. Fail at it. Then try something else. Vocation isn’t some test that you can memorize the answers to. You need fieldwork.

I suppose that my hope for you is to break the idea that vocation, your God-given calling, is something you need to worry about. Because worrying won’t get you anywhere.

Rather, by understanding the complexity of vocation, we, as privileged young Christians soon to be entering or recently having entered the secular career world, can trust God will allow us the flexibility and creative space for our vocations to develop over time. 

So, try your best. Fail well. Try something new. Plan ahead, but don’t set anything in stone. Resist subscribing to the cultural hierarchy of vocation. Sometimes there are no right decisions, just different ones. You can do something you not only enjoy but are actually good at, and God will still incorporate it into His plan, I promise. The world is full of needs that God is inviting you to explore.

See you out there.

words and photo by Morgan Anderson