VOCATION.LIFE By Scot McKnight from the book One.Life
I had just put down the phone after a conversation with a former student. She was finishing a law degree at a prestigious school. She had done an internship (or whatever it is called for lawyers) but was discouraged. Though she was nearing the end of her J.D. (Juris Doctorate), she was hesitating about completing her degree. She said she now wanted to move on to “do something that really matters.” I kept thinking that a law degree permits a person to interpret and apply law to our culture, the nobility of which often eludes even budding lawyers. Isn’t that something that really matters? I asked her what her parents were thinking.
“They want me to do whatever makes me happy.”
She didn’t think their advice was practical. I told her what I thought of her talents and character, which are both outstanding, and then I advised her to finish her J.D. and be a lawyer for two years, pay off all her school debts, and then re-evaluate. I told her that a vocation wrapped up in our legal system could be a noble life.
Throughout that afternoon, though, I kept thinking about what it means to do something that matters. I wondered about my paternal grandpa who was a coal miner and my grandma who didn’t get past the fourth grade. My grandparents nurtured a bundle of kids and made ends meet. I think what they did matters.
I know people who are lawyers and who drive big machines and who are school teachers and who are coaches and who are selling insurance and who are accountants and who are science research professors and who are dentists and who are pastors and who are missionaries. What each of these people does matters. I kept thinking about this word matters. I’m unconvinced that some jobs — the so-called “spiritual” ones — are valuable while others are “secular” and therefore not as valuable. I recently read the memoir of James Brown—known to football fans as J. B. and the host of CBS Sports’ The NFL Today—and I kept thinking that what he does also “matters.” When James Brown was dancing between a secure life in the business world and the more unpredictable life of reporting on TV, he realized that “there comes a point when you have to embrace risk and your dreams.”58 He chose his dream, cut himself away from his business career, and it has made all the difference.
This topic of vocation (or job or career) comes up often in my office, with students and in the hallways, with other professors, and we are all convinced that the current generation has some special ideas about jobs. First, they want to make lots of money because it’s the only life they’ve ever known — that is, if they’ve grown up middle class. Second, they want a career that combines what is fun with what is challenging. Third, they want to do things that “matter” or are significant for the world. My university captures this yearning in our motto: “Lives of Significance and Service.” And, fourth, we professors have observed that our students want to grow in their careers and find more and more joy as their careers progress.
Many my age (or younger or older) may be tempted to slap a leg, raise an eyebrow, and utter: “Good luck!” But deep inside we love the hopefulness of young adults. I believe there is a way of making everything you do matter, and it comes by attending once again to the kingdom dream of Jesus. But recent conclusions reveal that many are struggling to discover a career that matters. Perhaps the search for the elusive dream career that matters is, well, unexamined, and perhaps this unexamined career is what is causing all the confusion in the above conclusions. So I want to make a claim for you to consider: The unexamined vocation leads to what does not “matter.”
BUT
The examined vocation will “matter.” Perhaps the reason so many today flounder from one job to another is because instead of examining what they do in light of the kingdom, they fail to realize that what they are doing really does matter. (Unless they are paid to be professional spammers, which can’t be kingdom work.) It is time to reconsider what we do in light of the kingdom dream of Jesus, and I believe his kingdom vision can turn what we do into something that matters and can give our One. Life purpose.
Remember your dreams are glimpses of the Jesus kingdom dream. Your vocation, which in so many ways is unique to you, can genuinely matter if you keep your eyes on the kingdom of God as your guiding North Star. Teaching matters when you treat your students as humans whom you love and whom you are helping. Coaching soccer matters when you connect kids to the kingdom. Growing vegetables becomes kingdom work when we enjoy God’s green world as a gift from him. Collecting taxes becomes kingdom work when you treat each person as someone who is made in the image (the Eikon in Greek) of God and as a citizen instead of as a suspect.
Jobs become vocations and begin to matter when we connect what we do to God’s kingdom vision for this world. Sure, there’s scut work involved—like learning English grammar well enough to write clean sentences and reading great writers who can show you how good prose works. Like hours in the weight room and running sprints so you can become good enough to compete at high levels and learn the game of soccer so you can pass it on. Like long hours in the office in your early career to learn the ropes and master the job. Like hours with small children when we are challenged to make some mind-numbing routines into habits of the heart and kingdom.
It is easy to see missional work in the slums of India as something that matters. Perhaps the desire to do something that matters is why so many of us get involved in missional work like that. But most of us don’t have a vocation like that, and that means most of us do lots of scut work as a matter of routine. We have to believe that the mundane matters to God, and the way to make the mundane matter is to baptize what we do in the kingdom vision of Jesus. Kathleen Norris, whose writings breathe fresh—realistic—sparkles of life over many, put this well: “We want life to have meaning, want fulfilment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish to be.”
Some students, if I’m honest, bore me. I wonder why they are in my classes and I wonder if I’m wasting my time. I began my teaching career in a seminary, and a standard course I taught was called Greek Exegesis. Which meant we opened up the Greek New Testament and read it, and I interrogated students on how the grammar worked.
I loved it, and one of my students, Mark, didn’t. He liked the Chicago Cubs stories I told, but he didn’t like Greek. And he told me that — and I didn’t like it because I was doing what I dreamed when I got to teach Greek. He was a good student so he got by, and I tossed him into the pantry of former students. Then one day I saw him in town, and we chatted. He was pastoring and seemed to be doing well, in spite of never having thought Greek was important. Then a few years later he called me about a church he had started, and it was going well. He asked me to speak at his church over the next three years, and each time I spoke at his church the church was growing. No, I would have to say it was flourishing.
One day he asked to play golf, and during the round he said something that made teaching Mark worthwhile: “I remember when you said, way back in seminary class …” and I barely heard what he said next. This is why: When he was a student, I thought he was bored and wasn’t even listening. Yet, he was. And it helped him and it was still helping him. Even when we think we are wasting someone’s time, our scut work is to do what we are called to do and let God water and sun what we do. And God does. Because God is at work in whatever we do, we need to see we are doing much more than making money.
IT’S NOT ABOUT MONEY (COMPLETELY)
Only 15 percent of American households have a six-figure income and only about 5 percent of American individuals have a six-figure income. Instead of focusing our lives on a six-figure dream, followers of Jesus need to focus on the Kingdom.Life, which turns the six-figure dream inside out. Jesus’ dream involved a radical detachment from possessions:
But seek first his kingdom
and his righteousness,
and all these things [clothing, food, shelter]
will be given to you as well.
Matthew 6:33
It involved a willingness to contribute to the needs of others and virtually to renounce a life soaked in making money: Sell your possessions and give to the poor.
Luke 12:33
While many in the history of the Church have given up everything they owned in order to serve others, and I think of St. Basil the Great and St. Francis of Assisi, the rest of us are challenged to cut back and to tone it down so we can take from our abundance and provide for those who are in need.
When the Lord of the Christian is a poor man, the wealth of his followers is brought into embarrassing clarity. When the kingdom dream of Jesus shapes our vocations, it turns us from folks who strive for wealth into folks whose vocations are used for others.
PEOPLE ARE NEIGHBORS
At the very core of your One.Life and the kingdom dream are human beings and our personal relationships with others. Relationship talk isn’t sappy TV talk; relationships go to the guts of eternity, where we discover that the Three-in-One-God is Life.
There are very few ideas that move me so deeply they create silence, and this may be because I think I’ve landed on one of the deep secrets of life. The one silencing idea is the Trinity, the Christian belief that God is One and Three, Three and One, at the same time, always and forever. My soul goes silent when I meander in thought to pre-creation, when all that existed was this Three-in-One God, and I ask this question: Before it all began, before the stars and sun and sky and earth, before what Genesis 1 calls the tohu vabohu, or the “formless void,” what was God doing all alone?
Theologians have studied this and have landed upon one word that best approximates what God was doing. That word is perichoresis. That word describes the interpenetrating and mutual indwelling of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in One Another.
So what was God doing? God was perichoreting.
The Father and the Son and the Spirit were in an endless dance of endless love and surging joy and delightful play as they enjoyed the depth of their love for One Another. They were doing this forever and are doing this now and will do this eternally. At the core of life, in God’s own life, is this throbbing joy of mutual indwelling.
When I finish meandering, and I find myself doing this at least once a week, I land on this: Love is God’s gift to you and to me to enjoy the perichoreting of God. We get to do what God does when we love, because when we love we participate in mutual indwelling and interpenetrating one another. When we love, we enter into the Dance of Eternity. No wonder, I say to myself, sex symbolizes the relationship of the persons in the Trinity and no wonder sex symbolizes the relationship of God to the people of God. Sex is one of our high moments of interpenetration.
When Rob Bell and John Piper, two famous pastors today, speak of sex as either “this is that,” meaning sexuality points us toward spirituality (Bell) or “the mystery of Christ and the Church” (Piper), they are tapping into the deepest mystery of life by connecting what we get to do —marriage and sex and love — to who God is.
This deep mystery of life reveals that Life itself is personal. The deepest dimension of the kingdom dream and of life itself is that we are persons who dwell with other persons, and only in loving others do we tap into the core of that mystery. When we do, we know it.
If you want your job to “matter,” then keep in mind that life itself is about perichoreting with others—with your spouse or with your family or with your friends or with your community of faith or with your city or with your country or with the world and with those with whom you work. What we do matters when what we do is seen as something designed for persons.
AN EXAMPLE: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
President Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the United States (1850 – 1853), signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law in September 1850. Section five of that law commanded citizens “to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.” To translate: If you find an escaped slave, it’s your duty to return the slave to his or her master. The Fugitive Slave Act got under the skin of those who opposed slavery in a way that precipitated the end of slavery and the beginning of the Civil War, and no one was more irritated about this Fugitive Slave Act than Harriet Beecher Stowe.
So what did she do? Harriet did what she was gifted to do and, because of the dominant male power, she did what a woman could do. When the Fugitive Slave Act became law in Boston, Harriet’s sister Isabella Beecher Hooker wrote a letter to Harriet that was read to the family one evening: “Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”
Stowe’s biographer continues: “One of the Stowe children remembered that when this letter was read aloud in the parlor, Harriet ‘rose up from her chair’ and declared ‘I will write something. I will if I live.’ “Live she did and write she did. Her book was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it brought into perfect display the art of storytelling Harriet Beecher Stowe had mastered over the previous years in publishing stories. She had a knack at recording how ordinary people talked and she used her stories to shoot arrows at the heart. She began writing her famous novel by sending in weekly installments to the National Era, and her goal was to “show the best side of the thing and something faintly approaching the worst.”
The result was nothing less than stupendous — some 500,000 women in England, Ireland, and Scotland joined her crusade to battle slavery. She was the right person at the right time, and she chose the right method for the greatest number of people. She simply told stories that turned the white slave owner into performing inexcusable behaviors and the slave condition into a heart-rending life. According to her biographer, John Hedrick, through this novel Stowe became “the single most powerful voice on behalf of the slave,” and, unlike so many, she had the courage to act on her convictions. She gave her One.Life to the vocation she was gifted to live.
Stowe went straight to the White House to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, in a set of lines I was not taught as a schoolboy growing up in his state of Illinois, declared his own allegiance in these words: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; … What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I for bear I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
Stowe’s allegiance was higher, however, and she wasn’t satisfied. She challenged Lincoln by publishing a response that turned his words inside out, and they became some of the more memorable words in that historical struggle: My paramount object in this struggle is to set at liberty them that are bruised, and not either to save or destroy the Union. What I do in favor of the Union, I do because it helps to free the oppressed; what I forbear, I forbear because it does not help to free the oppressed. I shall do less for the Union whenever it would hurt the cause of the slave, and more when I believe it would help the cause of the slave.
Let no one doubt the power of the pen or the vocation of the novelist. Stowe’s words, alongside a personal visit with the President and Mrs. Lincoln in the White House just a month before the Emancipation Proclamation’s official announcement, surely had an impact on Lincoln.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, propelled by Christian convictions, relentless courage, and dogged determination to do something that mattered, did what she could do — her gifts were swallowed up by the kingdom vision of Jesus. She didn’t care about money and she knew the African (American) was her neighbor. That vision, dipped in ink, made her a force.
As I teach my classes, I sometimes ponder who might be the next Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or the next Alan Paton, whose Cry, the Beloved Country, the story of apartheid’s impact in South Africa, began to shatter the powers of racism. Or the next Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. I wonder who might be the one who will speak to our world and our culture and our country about the evils and injustices that need to be eradicated. Perhaps it will be you.
DO WHAT YOU DO WELL
I grew up with the idea that I could only be happy if I found “God’s will.” People do weird things because they think they are doing God’s will. I once met a man who told me God spoke to him about starting a fishing business in the Caribbean, and it so happened that he was from Minnesota, didn’t like the cold, and loved fishing. And it sure seemed to me that he blamed God for what he was doing, when perhaps he was calling the shots himself. (And from the look in his wife’s eyes, she agreed with me.) Still, leaving aside such examples, there’s something to focusing our attentive heart on God so that we can learn of God and listen to God and discern what God created us to do in this world.
This may be the most important thing we can learn about God’s will: God’s will … and what you dream about in your deepest dreams line up so well, you can usually chase your dreams and you will more often than not find God’s will.
There is a reason why so many people quote Frederick Buechner’s famous line about God’s will, because it tells a deep truth. Buechner said God’s will is this: “The place where God calls you is where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.” This beautifully combines the kingdom dream of Jesus and your own personal dream — find that place and do that. Another wise thinker about finding a life that matters is Parker Palmer, who borrowed an old Quaker idea when he said that we find a life that matters when “we let our life speak.”
If you keep your eye on the kingdom of God, if you keep in mind that deeply personal nature of all you do, then you can pursue that place where your deepest gladness and the world’s deepest needs meet, and in that place your life will speak. You are asked merely to discern the intersection of what God is doing—kingdom of God — and what you are asked to do in what God’s doing.
DO THAT
There are too many places where we find the world’s deepest hunger, and many of them appeal to us as the place where we might find our deepest gladness. When we try to do too many good things, we burn out or we tune out or we leave out someone we love. Ten years of chasing all of the world’s deepest hungers can almost ruin a life. I learned something long ago from my wife, Kris. I don’t remember that Kris ever said these words, but her life speaks it: “Do what you do best and let others do what they do best.” (By the way, this is very close to what the apostle Paul was getting at when he taught his churches to exercise their God-given, Spirit-shaped
gifts.)
Jesus said this so well when he told some would-be disciples that kingdom dreams take priority. One man, distracted by his family, asked Jesus if he could stop following him and do something else. Jesus said, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).
Those are strong words; they are also true words. The focus, Jesus teaches all of us, must be to do the thing we are called to do as something swallowed up in kingdom work. Long ago I decided that God called me to be a teacher and writer; that’s what I do. Some may not like my teaching and some may not like my books, but I believe that is what God called me to do and that’s what I do.
In order to “do that” one thing well, one must guard from trying to do too many other things. Saying no to other things is what keeps life balanced. I’ve never tried to do all the following things at the same time: I’ve never run for office or tried to be on the school board, nor been tempted to; I’ve never tried to start a church and pastor a church and teach classes and also speak at churches on weekends and write books and read everyone else’s books and start a magazine and edit a magazine and serve at the soup kitchen and teach a weeknight Bible study and work in the yard and plan trips to Central America to work on orphanages … In other words, I learned from Kris long ago to do what I do and don’t do what I don’t do. We have learned to keep our schedule simple.
Andy Crouch, a well-known and very smart Christian thinker, said we shouldn’t try to “save the world” but we should play our part in the redemptive work of this world with a small group of friends. I completely agree with Andy on this. I’d put it this way: the way to “save” the world is for everyone to do the one thing God calls them to do. When we start trying to do everything in an enthusiastic dash to save the world, we neither save the world nor do what we are called to do. So, keep your eyes on the kingdom, make it personal, do what you do well, do only that. Now just two more things …
IT’S OKAY TO DO ORDINARY JOBS
T. K., who works sometimes on our home, is good. I love to watch him do what God called him to do, and he’s one who does just that. T. K. works with his hands. He turned our kitchen from a fifty-year-old room into a room we love, and he converted our back porch into the coolest living space we could ever imagine. When he’s working at our house, I love to watch him and I don’t care if I get distracted from what I do. (By the way, he’s about thirty years old with the carpentry skills of a seasoned veteran.)
T. K. was born with a great artistic sense. He doesn’t read books like me because God framed him to use his hands to make things. He knows Kris and me and what we like so he can take his artistic sense and match it to what we like, even when we don’t know what we might like! He did the ceiling on our back porch and he began to explain what he had in mind and I had no idea what he was talking about — not the cut of the wood or the color he had in mind — so I said, “I’m not sure what you are talking about.”
He said, “Don’t worry, you’ll like it.”
To this day I can’t look up at our ceiling without saying, “T. K., buddy, you got it right. We love it.”
Let me ask you again about what matters. Too many think what matters is something huge and splashy and earth-shattering and world-reversing and far-off-land-saving. For many what matters must take place in a church or in a parachurch organization. But that’s not true. What really matters is that you do what God made you to do, that you live that piece of God’s dream that God gave to you.
LET THE KINGDOM VISION OF JESUS SWALLOW UP WHAT YOU DO
The further we get into the ordinary realities of our work, the harder it is to keep the kingdom of God in focus. So we return to our opening point but this time with a slightly different focus: Let God’s kingdom work swallow up what you do. It’s easier to be theoretical about the kingdom of God than it is to let the kingdom swallow up what you do. If the kingdom of God is about justice, love, peace, wisdom, and moral commitment, then you are summoned by God to let your life speak justice, love, peace, wisdom, and moral goodness—wherever you are and whatever you do. But does this “do something that matters” really matter? Does it matter ultimately or to God whether or not we follow Jesus? Does it matter whether or not we take seriously his words about kingdom — justice, love, peace, wisdom, Pentecost, and give him our total life? Does it really matter?
In one word: Yes. For Jesus, what you do with your life matters — both now and forever.
Read Scot McKnight's book One.Life: What is the “Christian life” all about? Studying the Bible, attending church, cultivating a prayer life, witnessing to others—those are all good. But is that really what Jesus has in mind? The answer, says Scot McKnight in One.Life, lies in Jesus’ words, “Follow me.” https://www.amazon.com/One-Life-Jesus-Calls-We-Follow/dp/0310277663
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