How to Figure Out Your Vocation

Who are you? What are you doing here? These are two of the biggest questions we tackle in life. That first question is one of identity. The second is all about vocation.

How do you know what you were put on this earth to do? Your vocation may include your job, but it is not your job. It’s bigger. Your job might be the means for funding your vocation. Your vocation is not your major. It’s not your resume. You don’t clock in and out of it. There’s no vacation from it. Your vocation is what you do. You are your vocation on your days off and in your free time.

When I spent some time with a job transition ministry, I listened to a guy encourage the group to put the words “so that…” on their resume. This stuck with me as a reminder that I’m not my work experience or my education. All those are means to an end. We’re often tempted to confuse our job with our identity or our vocation. But jobs come and go. Frequently. But not our identity. Not our vocation.

Being a doctor isn’t a vocation. Bringing healing to peoples’ lives is. Being a financial advisor isn’t a vocation. Helping people lead lives of freedom is. Being a pastor isn’t a vocation. Helping people discern the presence of God in their lives is.

What is all your work for in the end? What is that college education for? It has to be more than a paycheck. In this way, vocation is related to Sabbath because in Sabbath we live into the purpose of our work. In Sabbath, we lay down that which gives us a paycheck and participate in that for which God has made us.

If you don’t know your vocation, how do you figure it out?

Ask God about your vocation

As you practice spiritual disciplines like centering prayer or fasting or silence and solitude, ask God about your vocation. Make it part of your dialogue with God. In addition, ask those who know you well and that you trust—your pastor, your spiritual director, wise peers, and thoughtful family. God often speaks to us through the wisdom of faithful believers around us.

Your vocation goes far deeper than the contemporary platitude “Be yourself.” If being “true to yourself” is your highest goal, what happens, then, when you discover your darkest shadows, your self-destructive tendencies, your narcissism? As followers of Jesus, we learn to lay down our “false selves,” our “flesh” as Paul frequently calls it.

Paul says, “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” And Jesus says, “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”

Seeking our vocation isn’t about self-fulfillment or self-enlightenment as if we are individuals existing in a vacuum. If it is God who made us and the world, there is wisdom in going to the source and simply asking. Before stubbornly staking a claim in what you want, listen. Listen patiently.

Consider your vocation in terms of what you love

What do you want to be when you grow up? J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan the boy never wanted to grow up, writes, “Nothing is really work unless you’d rather be doing something else.”

Your vocation isn’t something God wants for you that you just have to endure, as if it were like eating vegetables or running for exercise. Your vocation is where you get lost in the flow.

Some people love spreadsheets. Some love animals. Others love making music or creating stories. Still others love helping people. What do you love? What do you spend your time daydreaming about? What do you get lost in doing? What are the things that people wish you’d stop talking about because you get so excited?

I remember seeing the band Wilco in concert. Watching Jeff Tweedy, Nels Cline, and Glenn Kotche getting so lost in their music reminded me of the popular saying of Irenaus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Consider your vocation in terms of what you’re good at

You are a human being made in the image of God. There are things you know how to do like nobody else. You have a voice that no one in the world has. You have a unique perspective of the world that no one else has. And the world needs you and what you’re good at.

So what are you good at? Are you uniquely gifted making people feel listened to? Are you good at creating systems? Are you skilled at public speaking and presentations?

You may very well experience some painful rejections as you learn what you’re good at by learning through experience what you’re not good at. There may be callings you passionately desire, but you just don’t fit. It can sting learning to lay down those desires. Pruning promotes growth in plants, and we’re the same way. It’s not unusual to find that a painful “no” leads you one step closer to the most deeply satisfying “yes.”

Consider your vocation in terms of the unique challenges of your time and place

Why are you here in this place right now? If God could have made you in any time, in any culture, in any place on earth, why this one? The story of Esther in the Old Testament includes the oft-repeated line, “Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?” In the context, Esther is being challenged by her cousin to stand up against the powers that threaten to destroy her people. There is a purpose that you are right here right now.

Today in North America, we live in a time and place in which money is a necessary part of our reality. It costs money to eat, to feed our families, to pay for a house or an apartment. When was the last time you went an entire day without spending money? Acquiring money is a necessary part of our lives. Unfortunately, many of us endlessly confuse acquiring money for our vocation. But falling into this trap is one of many ways we find ourselves stripped of our humanity.

Fortunately, when we know how to solve someone’s problem effectively and efficiently, they are more than happy to give us money for our time and skill. In the best of worlds, this is what a job is.

So whose problems do you know how to solve?

Maybe your community needs passionate mentors for children. Maybe they need websites built. Maybe they need stories told or financial management. Or perhaps you’re able to apply your passions and skills to larger issues like community health, climate change, or political leadership.

You are a human being made in the image of God. And so, first and foremost, your vocation involves reflecting the bold creativity of the God who thought heaven and earth (and you) were a good idea. It’s only in embracing this calling that we find a satisfaction with our place in the great and wonderful universe.

Parker Palmer writes in his classic manifesto about vocation Let Your Life Speak, “Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be.”

If you’d like to meet with a spiritual director to begin discerning your vocation, send me a note.

If you want to dig deeper:
Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation is indispensable reading on the subject of calling. Two books on the topic of how work and career relate to vocation I recommend are Jeff Goins’ The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do and Jon Acuff’s Do Over: Make Today the First Day of Your New Career.