Finding Your Calling, Without Changing Your JobSample

Part of my reticence to see my everyday work as a calling was that I had been expecting something cooler. I had expected to be called—like a character in a movie who gets struck by a lightning-like realization—to go somewhere! I had wanted to board a ship for an unknown country and adventure!

I wanted my life to be less like reality and more like a movie. I would have much rather followed a calling to the ends of the earth than shown up where I was—in my boring everyday life.

“Where do you want me to go, God?” I asked in my prayers, hoping God would send me a picture of someplace more interesting than the office park twenty minutes down the road from my house.

And yet, when the Bible talks about calling, it often has nothing to do with picking up and moving somewhere else. Paul doesn’t tell the Romans that once they follow God’s call, they have to leave their full-time jobs and travel across the empire preaching and planting churches. Paul didn’t even do that full time! Paul was a tent-maker most of the time. Even after he heard Jesus’ call and became an apostle, he still worked his trade, day in and day out, sewing tents. I wonder if it was boring for him sometimes, picking up his needle and awl when he would have rather been picking up a bag for travel. 

But as Paul writes in Romans 8:28, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

God certainly worked Paul’s life for the good of many people. Could God do the same thing for me?

While I wanted to follow a calling someplace new and exciting, that job in that office park was exactly where I needed to be. Not only because I had a job to do there, but also because I had to learn some hard lessons about patience, persistence, and humility.

According to Romans 8:28, God isn’t necessarily calling us to a new place. God is calling us to a new purpose. And with that purpose, God works all things for our good.

Prayer: God, thank you for calling me to your purpose. May I see the purpose you have for me in my job today. Amen.