Most of us stop being asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” somewhere around our twenties, but the question underneath it never really goes away. It just changes shape: whether to take the promotion, whether to leave the job, whether the work in front of us actually matters, whether this one life is being spent on the right things. Christian tradition has a word for this question that’s bigger than “career”: vocation, from the Latin for “calling.” The claim behind the word is a specific one: that there’s Someone doing the calling, and that the work of a life is learning to listen and then respond.
One idea gets in the way of that listening more than almost any other: the sense that some work is spiritually significant and the rest is just what pays the bills. In a lot of church cultures, work done inside a church building, or carrying an explicitly religious label, gets treated as “ministry,” while the other forty-plus hours a week, the accounting, the parenting, the nursing, the code, get treated as spiritually neutral at best. Timothy Keller and Katherine Alsdorf push back on this directly: “whether splicing a gene or doing brain surgery or collecting the rubbish or painting a picture, our work further develops, maintains, or repairs the fabric of the world. In this way, we connect our work to God’s work” (Keller & Alsdorf, 2014). If that’s true, it’s hard to argue any honest work sits outside what God cares about.
Three questions, not one
Looked at closely, vocation usually turns out to be three overlapping questions rather than one: who am I called to be (identity), how am I called to live (commitment), and what am I called to do (service). Most of the tension people feel around calling comes from these three pulling in different directions at once: the job that pays well but doesn’t fit who you are, the values that seem to evaporate by Tuesday morning at the office, the caregiving that leaves no room for the work that feels most like “you.” Steven Garber, echoing an old prayer of the church, writes that the best of vocation is learning to “love and serve… with gladness and singleness of heart” (Garber, 2014), not identity, commitment, and service running in parallel, but the same person showing up whole in all three.
Learning to listen for it
Calling assumes two things: that someone is doing the calling, and that the one being called is capable of hearing. Christian tradition has developed a handful of concrete practices for that kind of listening, worth knowing even if you never adopt one formally:
- The examen (Ignatian spirituality): a daily review of where a sense of God’s presence, or its absence, showed up in the day just lived.
- Clearness committees (a Quaker practice): a small group asking open, non-directive questions to help someone reach their own answer, rather than handing out advice.
- Lectio divina (Benedictine monastic tradition): a slow, repeated reading of a short text, listening for what catches attention rather than reading for information.
- The informal versions most people already do without naming them: journaling, a long walk, praying out loud, talking a decision through with someone who actually knows you.
What these share matters more than their particulars: each one creates space, deliberately, in a life that won’t generate that space on its own. Discernment doesn’t compete well against a full calendar; it has to be scheduled against it.
The vocation of loving the people you work with
Whatever identity, commitment, and service point you toward, nearly all of it happens alongside other people, and it’s entirely possible to be conscientious about “the work” while fairly careless about the people doing it next to you.
A few habits do more here than any policy or personality test. Remembering the actual details of a colleague’s life, a parent’s illness, a coming wedding, a kid starting school, and bringing them up again later without being asked to, tells someone they were heard the first time, not just tolerated. Staying genuinely present in a conversation that’s wandered off-topic, rather than visibly waiting for it to get back to the point, communicates something a scheduled check-in can’t. Scripture’s version of this is blunt: “be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:19), and on the temptation to treat coworkers as instruments of your own goals, “in humility count others more significant than yourselves… look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4). None of this requires oversharing or forced friendship, only noticing, and then following up on what you noticed. When someone mentions a hard week and you say “I’ll be praying for you,” the real test is whether you remember to ask again in a week.
Work, rest, and the rhythm underneath both
A theology of vocation that only talks about work eventually produces people who don’t know how to stop working, which is its own kind of formation, just not a healthy one. The creation account closes, notably, not with a task but with rest, God completing the work of creation and then resting from it (Genesis 2:1-3), before a single human being had done a day’s labour to justify a rest of their own. Sabbath was never a reward for finishing; it was built into the rhythm from the start, a standing reminder that a person’s worth doesn’t rise and fall with their output.
Practically, this means treating rest as a discipline rather than a leftover, something scheduled and protected, not just whatever happens once everything else is done, because for most people nothing is ever quite done. Ignoring this rhythm rarely announces itself as a crisis. It shows up first as a quiet inability to be present anywhere: at work because you’re tired, at rest because you’re still thinking about work.
When the answer doesn’t come easily
Vocation makes its clearest sense in hindsight and its least sense in the middle of a hard season. A layoff, a diagnosis, a divorce, a loss: these don’t pause vocation, they reshape it, sometimes badly, sometimes in ways that only make sense years later. Dallas Willard put the underlying posture this way: “God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being ‘right,’ we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life” (Willard, 1998).
Some people find that suffering clarifies what actually matters to them; others find it makes them question whether they were called to any of it, including their faith. Both are part of the same long process, not evidence that one person is doing calling correctly and the other isn’t. What seems to matter most isn’t finding the right explanation, tidy answers tend not to survive contact with real grief, but continuing to show up to the next ordinary task while clarity is still missing.
What actually helps, in practice
- Build one discernment practice into a fixed point in your week, not “whenever I have time.” A ten-minute daily examen or a weekly walk without a phone does more than either would done occasionally.
- Ask the sacred-secular question of your own work directly: what would change about how you do your job if you believed it mattered to God the same way volunteering at church does?
- Find one or two people who know you well enough to ask hard, specific questions, and actually give them permission to ask them.
- Pick one colleague relationship and go one level deeper than task talk this week: ask about something they mentioned before, and follow up again next time you see them.
- Put one fixed block of real rest on your calendar, treated with the same seriousness as a meeting you can’t move, not just whatever’s left over.
- When work and identity feel in conflict, name the specific tension rather than the general feeling. “This job asks me to be dishonest in small ways” is more useful than “I don’t know if this is the right job.”
- In hard seasons, lower the bar from “make sense of this” to “do the next right, ordinary thing.” Clarity usually arrives well after the season that prompted the question, not during it.
- Revisit the question periodically. A sense of calling that felt settled at twenty-five is allowed to look different at forty-five.
Sources
- Garber, S. (2014). Visions of vocation: Common grace for the common good. InterVarsity Press.
- Keller, T., & Alsdorf, K. L. (2014). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God’s work. Penguin Books.
- Stevens, R. P. (1999). The other six days: Vocation, work, and ministry in biblical perspective. Eerdmans.
- Willard, D. (1998). The divine conspiracy: Rediscovering our hidden life in God. HarperCollins.