More Articles on Finding Your Vocation

VocationFinding Your Vocation

The Courage to Choose

| 7 min read

What do you do when there’s no single “right answer”?  Like many 20-somethings, I’ve spent the last few years wondering about my how my future career might turn out, constantly finding myself asking the question I’ve been hearing my whole life: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I finished college with no real career plans, was encouraged to participate in a leadership development program (in my case called the Falls Church Fellows) focused on work and faith, and despite my hopes that I would leave the program with a step-by-step plan for what kind of career...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Why You (Yes, You) Need a Hobby

| 10 min read

I recently joined an industry trade group and was asked what my hobbies were.  I struggled to answer. I couldn’t think of a hobby, let alone multiple ones! Do working people actually have hobbies? With all the things that I have to do and a career to conquer, I cannot imagine having a hobby. Aren’t hobbies for people with excess free time or years of retirement? I have neither. I recently moved to a new town. I’m building a new business. And I’m married with three children at home. Being faithful to the various callings of my life has me...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

“Because I Want To?” – A Christian Approach to Desire and Vocational Calling

| 10 min read

Many will remember the old game show The $64,000 Question, an American television staple in the 1950’s.  As time passes, fewer may remember that the phrase predated the show.  The phrase “$64,000 question” indicated the question at the heart of the issue, often the question hardest to answer.  One can see the obvious appeal when naming a quiz show early in the television era.  Alas, inflation has taken its toll, and I often now hear this as the $64,000,000 question.  Much more impressive to modern ears!  The point remains – what is at the heart of the issue?  What is...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Embracing the Unknown: Rethinking the Job Search

| 9 min read

Having a new job is exciting – new challenges and experiences, opportunities to work with new people, and chance to learn and grow professionally. Finding a new job, on the other hand, can seem like navigating a maze with many unexpected turns and dead ends. The ebbs and flows of the job search quickly turn into the rise and fall of emotion, a ricochet from excitement and eager anticipation to disappointment and defeat. An extended job search, like those taking place during the global pandemic, can lead to frustration and anxiety. The slowness and uncertainty of the process often leaves...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Stop “Letting Go and Letting God”

| 14 min read

It is high time to put open and closed doors in their place.  “Well, that’s an open door, so I guess God wants me to walk through it.”  Or, “That’s a closed door, so it must not be God’s will.”  Such statements sound like trust in God, but in fact they indicate Christians taking the path of least resistance, not necessarily following God’s calling as we choose our vocations and make other important choices. Sometimes God wants us to beat on a closed door until we break it open.  William Wilberforce famously heard God’s call, not to ministry but to...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Gently Glowing Bushes: When Your Calling Isn’t Obvious

| 5 min read

It’s one of the most common–and paralyzing–questions that Christians ask, “How do I know my vocation?” Many times I’ve talked to folks who are afraid to make a bold move forward, or are stuck between good options and unable to move for fear of missing God’s will. Karen Yates writes: How do we find what we are meant to do?  This is the infamous and expansive search – the quest for our unique calling.  This is the question that keeps us up at night, that makes forty-somethings leave their lives in search for something better, that keeps twenty-somethings from staying...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Community, Loneliness, and the Frameworks We Live By

| 7 min read

“It is not easy to tell a story, certainly not when you have an indication to run quickly toward a happy ending. How can I find the courage to write stories that don’t fit a pre-fabricated frame?” -Henri Nouwen On the morning of July 1, 2019, I woke up with a pit in my stomach. I had recently completed a rigorous post-graduate fellowship in Washington, D.C., gotten a full-time job, and moved to a new city. And yet, on the morning of my 24th birthday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. As I stood weeping...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Nehemiah and the Amazing Technicolor Career Choice

| 6 min read

When faced with a large number of potential careers, young adults are often paralyzed by the choice.  They so often want to “not get it wrong” that they can find it almost impossible to make any choice, often running to others to make the choices for them.  The problem, of course, is that in the end no one else can – or at least should – do that for us.  In the end we must make and own our own vocational decisions.  I do a lot of career advising, using various assessments to help people think through which careers might...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Very Beautiful, Very Broken

| 3 min read

Which way should I go? That isn’t the only question human beings ask, but it is a common question, and given who I am and what I do, it is a question I hear most every day in one form or another. Born from a complex of questions about the meaning of our lives, about the nature of vocation— who am I? what is life about? what is my life about? what should I do with my life? — it is one that every one of us asks along the way. For the last couple of days I have been...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

On Planting Trees

| 4 min read

“I’ve planted four trees in our yard this year.” Words, words, and more words…. so many words. Mostly we forget them, and perhaps we should. But some words stick, defining our days, sometimes our lives. We have been making a decision over the last ten months, slowly coming to see its hope and meaning, and in the last few days have decided to accept the invitation to join the faculty of Regent College in Vancouver, BC, an appointment which will begin this fall. Some things we know, which draw us in, and some things we don’t know, and we can...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Learning to Learn About Things That Matter

| 3 min read

Yesterday I spoke at Friends University in Wichita, a school in the Quaker tradition. A glorious building was imagined, and then brought into being in the late 19th-century to house this hope for educating the next generation of “Friends,” as they called themselves. For a time it held more floor space under one roof than any other educational facility west of the Mississippi River. I was drawn in because they have been reading the Visions of Vocation— administrators, faculty, students and board of trustees —and we spent a day talking about what its thesis would mean for them. It is...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

On Murder Mysteries and the Meaning of Vocation Too

| 3 min read

Reading a mystery? For class? Seriously? This is the second week for the Capital Fellows, the graduate seminar I teach every Monday morning through the fall, September to December, and the first book I had them read was Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body? one of the wonderfully complex stories of Lord Peter Wimsey, the very amazing detective who sees and hears more than most ever imagine. It could be simply biography and bias, as in the first year of marriage Meg and I read each of Sayers’ stories aloud, enjoying every minute of mystery together, but I think it is more...

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