Career and Vocation
To live no tight, neat role is truly sacrificial, it is also truly creative because it leaves us open and free (dare we say) like God himself.
– Alan Jones, dean of the Cathedral of San Francisco
I still get the occasional alumni reports. I am not sure how they track me down. But in their glossy pages, I see the shadow of my unmet potential. And tracing back, I see the tight, neat path of my previous life. Perhaps there’s no narrower path than medicine. For me, the journey began when I was fourteen, and did not end until I was nearly thirty, consuming over fifteen of the most formative years of my life. It began innocently enough, with an unadulterated curiosity for knowledge, a discovered knack for working with my hands, and above all the desire to be excellent. But as Annie Dillard writes, “how you spend your days is how you spend your life.” I thought too much about what I would be doing, and not enough about who I would become doing it.
In the end, that question was not difficult to answer: I had only to look at those around me who had continued on the narrow path of academic promotion. What I saw felt impossible to reconcile with two major events that had occurred in my life: marriage, and the birth of our first child. There were few thriving marriages among the medical elite, for reasons that became obvious as we struggled to establish ourselves as a young couple while navigating the demands of call and career. And about the birth of our child—well, it was like what someone once quoted their friend as saying of their first-born daughter: “I found I loved her more than evolution required.” And I found I did not want to leave her so much to the care of others. Eventually, the decision to step off that narrow path was not so hard after all.
A decade or so later, I find myself in a place that feels contextually like being everywhere, and nowhere. I operate, see patients, take call, preach, teach, parent, and housekeep, but without the lifestyle or context that seem typical of others who do those things with similar seriousness. The manner in which I do nearly everything is so unusual as to require explanation, and so unprecedented as to make it on whole a solitary experience.
“ Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.”
In his memoir The Pastor, Eugene Peterson writes of his wife: “Her vocation, while not as easily recognized by others or defined to others as mine, was nevertheless distinctive and not to be confused with any of the stereotypes that are still too common.” Perhaps that word vocation captures best what feels most different about life now. Career was a matter of willful hewing to external standards. Vocation is more about listening. The word comes from the Latin word for “calling”—vocation is living with responsive purpose.
Vocation feels like less of an outward-in movement, and more of an inward-out: before, my big-yes was to an outward path, a predetermined track, and the no’s followed accordingly. Now, my life is a big-yes to where I discern God is moving in my situation and in his kingdom—where those two movements intersect—and then many no’s to everything else. That inward-out movement sometimes makes sense, and sometimes does not. Some parts are predictable, others are frighteningly not. It feels as distinctive and meaningful as anything I’ve ever done, yet none of it is readily catalogued into an alumni report.
The interesting thing is, I see my husband living the same inside-out life, even though he inhabits the world of the academic elite and would fit right in on one of those glossy pages. To live there, but live it vocationally, is just as difficult in its own way. He is constantly discerning, thinking carefully about what to say “yes” and “no” to, examining his motives, retreating for perspective, asking for advice and prayer. Sometimes, he feels quite out of place. Other times, he sees clear evidence of why he is there. His life carries the same elements of sacrifice and creativity, though it plays out in different ways.
Maybe this is simply the movement we all make the more we live into God’s kingdom: reexamining not only what we do, but why we are doing it, and who we are becoming along the way. Becoming cognizant of what we are living in response to, whatever path we take in life.
