When I was a
boy, I remember adults asking me, “What do you want to be when you grow
up?” Like most boys of my acquaintance and
age I would answer, “I want to be a big-league baseball player.” Later I would say, “I want to be (in order of
my evolving aspirations) “a game warden or forest ranger,” or, if my golf game
was ‘on’ I would say, “a professional golfer,” or, if my game was ‘off,’ and I knew
I needed a job that would get me more than $1.25 an hour, an “orthopedic
surgeon.” But when I considered my high
school grades being just a little above average knew that being a surgeon would be
out-of-the-question, and seeing I might get drafted into the service of my
country, I considered the best alternative to that seeming inevitability as
applying to be an officer in the Marine Corps; but again seeing more clearly that that would
not be a good idea, I would think (but not say), “I would just like to grow
up—the sooner the better—and marry my childhood sweetheart and build a cabin in
the woods and be blissfully happy with her and my dog and my books and my
fishing rod.”
At the time of
my mid- adolescence I learned of the concepts of ‘career’ and of ‘vocation,’
though I thought a career was mostly just a label describing a job that lasted
a lifetime, and ‘vocation’ was just a difficult job, hopefully a fun job, but
certainly a ‘manly’ job such as carpenter, or lumberjack or car mechanic such
as my dad had. But I had not considered
a real vocation a ‘calling’ that had implications beyond what I saw on the
surface. Yet there was some inchoate thought regarding my future that ran
through the back-burner of my mind from about age 13 on, and that was I wanted
to teach something, and I wanted to be a disciple of Jesus; I wanted to live a
useful life and, to use a term learned in my Faith, “meet the measure of my
creation.” There was something I needed to do.
At the end of my first semester of community
college when I turned eighteen things began to gel. With encouragement from the girlfriend I really
didn’t want to lose (she later became my wife—a gift sent to me from God) I
really bore down and went about focusing on achieving my goals and discovering
God’s goals for me: spiritual and educational growth, and settling on more than
a just a job to make a living, or even a career, but entering upon a useful vocation
where I could make a ‘life’ for me and those close to me, and, perhaps,
contribute to the lives of others. Marriage, I felt, was critical to that
process. Later that year I entered my
junior year in college and in the same month married my childhood sweetheart,
and for the first time really took my education and my future seriously. I assiduously studied physical education and
the social sciences, and on my off-campus time really began to focus on my
spiritual growth and my marriage. It was
a season of maturing.
By the time
I was twenty-one I had graduated from college, started public school-teaching
and, after several months of serious investigation of The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, with my young wife joined that church,
convinced that it had answers to many of my deepest questions, and opened possibilities
that my previous religious experience had not adequately answered or
illuminated. This decision was a point of conversion. And through it I felt
that I had stepped onto the path of ‘vocation.’
An important
thing to understand about finding one’s ‘vocation’ is that if it is truly his
vocation it leads to joy. My Church teaches, and it rings true, that, “Man is,
that he might have joy.” One’s vocation
requires that it involve sacrifice, which seems a contradiction, but it is not.
To enter a vocation is to leave some things behind. Sacrifice is to give up
something good, for something better. Marriage,
as a prime example, is a vocation; it is to give up a lesser good—a degree of
freedom and irresponsibility, for something much better—a companionship and
affection, a helpmeet both to give to and to receive from, an object of focus
other than self, a union in charity, a potential for family—a bringing into the
world and a forming of young souls, of becoming a creator or a partner in
creation of assuming and passing on eternally meaningful responsibilities and
possibilities.
A vocation,
I learned, is to enter a good work—a significant work—and to give yourself to
it. In a sense, one who does so can identify with Christ: “For this was I born,
and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth”
(John 18:36). To engage in a vocation is done in order to submit ourselves to
what our own conscience or inspiration tells us to be the truth and the will of
God to do in behalf of others. It is a response to a felt necessity, or even a “summoned
life.”
How do you
find your vocation?
“When ye are
in the service of your fellow beings, you are only in the service of your God”
(Book of Mormon, Mosiah 2:17). You are also
in the service of yourself, obliquely, if you are not focusing on yourself.
“The vocation
of each one of us is fixed just as much by the need others have for us as by our
own need for other men and for God” (Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island,
p. 141).
Well there
you have it. My advice would be to find
your vocation, your purpose in life, as soon as you can—whether at age 20, or
40, or 60, or 80. As you age you may discover a new vocation for you or a first
real vocation as you close down your career or the series of jobs that provided
for your living. It is a way of defining
and refining your character and organizing your life, what you have left of it,
in a meaningful way. And, you will find,
it will in some way help others.
In short, to
find your vocation look around and see who needs your help and who you seem
naturally attracted to and who or what God seems to be pointing you to after
you have prayed to Him for guidance. David
Brooks said it well, “A vocation is not found by looking within and finding
your passion. It is found by looking
without and asking what life is asking of us” (David Brooks, The Road to
Character, 2015). When you find it,
commit to serve. Lose yourself in it,
and as you do, you will ‘find’ yourself as the scriptures say, but you will
also find something greater. What, you
ask? Just do it and you will find out.
As it said
on the welcoming marquee of my university: ENTER TO LEARN; GO FORTH TO SERVE. Good
advice.
