Friday, December 21, 2007
Vocation
AL Mohler quotes at length from the book The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture by Professor A. J. Conyers. Frankly, this post is one of the best things I have ever read on Mohler's blog. Mohler chooses to emphasize that vocations, a sense of calling, is something that happens only in community. Fair and true enough. But there is something else in the rich quotes that I want to pick up on, related, but not precisely the same:
When I was young and in ministry, I made virtually no money. One of the things I told God when I left ministry was that I was unwilling to be poor if I was going to have "secular" work. Well I went from not having two pennies to rub together to having two pennies to rub together, but that was all, It was not until, years later, I came to the point where I understood that I was where God wanted me to be, that I was in fact, doing WHAT I WAS CALLED TO DO, that the money began to flow.
The problem is not wealth itself, but our attitude towards it. Feeling oneself as a part of community is part of having the proper attitude. But the real point, the deeper point is that we do not have jobs to make money to get things.
We serve God.
In serving God, you serve others, that may be as a barista and it may be as a writer, and it may be as a pastor, but we serve God, and therefore God's people. We then in a separate transaction - completely separate - rely upon God to provide for us. That is hard, but that is the way of things, and in my experience it works.
Which brings me to a major point. Too many people look for the job they are called to. "What am I supposed to do with my life." That is the second question. The first question is "Who do I serve with my life?" And you can have the right answer to the first question no matter what your job is.
Let me emphasize what I just said - your calling is to serve God and His people, you can do that in any job, and if you do that in any job, the rest of the stuff will work itself out.
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The idea of "vocation" – of being "called" is at first commonplace until one actually begins to think what an extraordinary thing is suggested by such language. It suggests of course, that life does not center on the choices of individuals, and that community does not emerge entirely by appealing to those choices the way modern societies ever since the industrial age assumed, being wholly distracted by the wealth-making power of the market and its appeal to the individual consumer. Vocation instead implies that a larger obligation presses itself upon persons and draws them into a community of mutual sacrifice and affection. Not centering in the individual, the obligations and the affections are understood as coming from a transcendent source.Implicit in that bit of wisdom is that wealth-making is antithetical to having a sense of call. Think about phrases like "starving artist."
When I was young and in ministry, I made virtually no money. One of the things I told God when I left ministry was that I was unwilling to be poor if I was going to have "secular" work. Well I went from not having two pennies to rub together to having two pennies to rub together, but that was all, It was not until, years later, I came to the point where I understood that I was where God wanted me to be, that I was in fact, doing WHAT I WAS CALLED TO DO, that the money began to flow.
The problem is not wealth itself, but our attitude towards it. Feeling oneself as a part of community is part of having the proper attitude. But the real point, the deeper point is that we do not have jobs to make money to get things.
We serve God.
In serving God, you serve others, that may be as a barista and it may be as a writer, and it may be as a pastor, but we serve God, and therefore God's people. We then in a separate transaction - completely separate - rely upon God to provide for us. That is hard, but that is the way of things, and in my experience it works.
Which brings me to a major point. Too many people look for the job they are called to. "What am I supposed to do with my life." That is the second question. The first question is "Who do I serve with my life?" And you can have the right answer to the first question no matter what your job is.
Let me emphasize what I just said - your calling is to serve God and His people, you can do that in any job, and if you do that in any job, the rest of the stuff will work itself out.
Technorati Tags:work, job, vocation, calling, prosperity, wealth
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