Freshman Reflections From Belmont UniversitySample

Day 29 – Vocation
Much of college life is ordered toward what happens after college: landing a job, getting into grad school, moving on to the “real” world. Thus, we are often tempted to think of our lives here as somehow not the “real” world.

Think back over the past few days and weeks. Your excitement to be here was real. Your homesickness is real. The attraction to that certain person in your FYS is real (well, maybe). Your sense of being overwhelmed by the things your professors expect you to do before Christmas is real. The bill you have to pay every semester is real. I’ve been with college students long enough to know that this is very much the real world.

Our temptation—exacerbated by social media—is to regard the people in our lives as somehow less than real, as mere characters we encounter on our way to the “real world.”

If the incarnation of God as Jesus teaches us anything, it teaches us that right here and right now are the moments that God, in all of God’s self, breaks into and redeems. The beginning of any faithful conversation about vocation has to be based in this: there is no day, no time, no place more real than this day, this time and this place. It also means, of course, that we are in the midst of real people.

Samuel might have been like a college student. After all, he was serving and learning, much like a student does, waiting for the time when his vocation would become clear—that time when he would be in the “real world.” God, however, sees all that we do as real, and thus calls us in these moments the same way that God called Samuel. Look all around you, listen all around you, and I guarantee that you’ll hear God speaking.

MICAH WEEDMAN
Associate University Minister & Director of Outreach