How Do You Find Your Calling in Life?

When I was eighteen, I carried a vivid picture of what my life would be like when I was twenty-eight. During my first semester of college, my English professor assigned an essay describing how we envisioned our lives in ten years. I described an evening of horseback riding into the sunset (yes, it’s true) with my future husband (whoever he was – I couldn’t see his face in this picture – we were facing the sunset, after all) with our two Labrador retrievers ambling alongside. I imagined that my husband and I had been married for five years, that I was established in my career as a social worker (the major I started with in college), and that on that ride we discussed starting a family.

I had it so clearly mapped out.

I met the man who would become my husband just weeks after writing the essay. We married a year later. Three semesters later, I changed my major from social work to English. (I would have made a terrible social worker.) I went on to get a PhD in English. We were never able to have children. We did have horses and have owned numerous dogs throughout our decades of marriage. (Never a Labrador retriever though.) I didn’t know it then, but I was on my way to discovering my calling. But it would take a while.

What do we mean when we talk about being called? The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word from which we also get the word “call,” along with the words “vocal” and “vocalization.” A call, most literally, is an audible sound, cry, or summons. In this literal sense, a call is a summons of someone by someone else. A call requires both a caller and the called.

A calling from God isn’t an audible vocalization such as that given by a military commander or an order from a judge given in court. Rather, God uses the things he has made – other people, our circumstances, our gifts, and even our passions – to sound that call. It is not our job to be called. It is our job to answer the call. The Bible is replete with stories of people being called. Indeed, within the biblical context and within our own lives, calling is “a metaphor for the life of faith itself.” But hearing and discerning this call so that we can answer it isn’t always easy. While passion burns inside us, a call comes from outside.

There’s a famous line from the classic horror movie When a Stranger Calls: “The call is coming from inside the house.” If we were our own callers, it would be kind of a horror-movie situation. But understanding that a calling takes place outside ourselves helps us live in the truth that the pressure to be called is not our own. Passion is inside; a calling comes from outside. They don’t always entirely coincide.

For one, your calling isn’t just about you.

The doctrine of vocation is a robust acknowledgment of the truth that God intended human beings to provide for each other through each other’s work. Rather than providing manna from heaven, as he once did, God uses the work of farmers, bakers, truck drivers, and grocers to feed us. Rather than creating each new person from the dust of the earth, God has chosen to use the vocations of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, to create new human beings. Thus, as Gene Edward Veith explains in God at Work, the doctrine of vocation is both “a theology of ordinary life” and “a comprehensive doctrine of the Christian life, having to do with faith and sanctification, grace and good works.” Indeed, the ultimate test of whether we are being called to something, Veith says, is to ask, “How does my calling serve my neighbor?”

When someone calls, it means they have a need they think you can fill. This is the heart of vocation. Vocation is not about being able to fulfill our desires, pursue our passions, or follow our bliss. Vocation is about being called by others to serve. This understanding offers a much bigger vision of vocation than mere self-fulfillment. Indeed, Os Guinness argues that “by drastically reducing the immensity of its significance to our individual lives alone,” we also diminish our understanding of calling itself and of what it means to be called by God.

Fulfillment is like happiness in this way. Happiness, says Viktor Frankl – writing following his miraculous survival after being imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps – “cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen.”

Frank Buchser, Reaper in a Flowery Meadow, 1886–87.

What Andrew Peterson says about art in Adorning the Dark might just be true of all callings: “Art shouldn’t be about self-expression or self-indulgence. Art shouldn’t be about self…. The aim ought to be for the thing to draw attention ultimately to something other than the self.” As Christians, we know what that ultimate other thing should be. The irony, Peterson points out, is that “we are most ourselves when we are thinking least about ourselves.”

There’s a good illustration of this perspective in the book Make Your Job a Calling. The story is told of a driver who came upon a traffic jam amid some road construction on a long, two-lane highway in the mountains. The road was teeming with late-afternoon traffic because one lane was closed. Just as this driver was about to be let through, the flagman turned his sign around to the stop side, and the driver found himself at the head of the new line next to the flagman and settled in for a long wait. The driver began to talk to the flagman – someone whose job it was to stand there all day, day in and day out, in all kinds of weather – and asked him how he could tolerate such a boring job. Imagine the driver’s surprise when the flagman replied, “I love this job! Love it. You know why? Because it matters. I keep people safe. I care about these guys behind me, and I keep them safe. I also keep you safe, and everybody else in all those cars behind you. I get to make a real, tangible difference every day.”

Oddly enough, in a time when we’ve diminished the concept of vocation, we also tend to define ourselves by our work. “What do you do?” is one of the first questions we ask upon meeting a new person (a particularly American tic). We are a work-centric culture even when, perhaps especially when, we lack a sense of vocation. Vocation includes work, but it is more than just a career, job, or source of income.

Jennifer Wiseman is an astronomer who studies the continuing formation of stars. I met Jennifer at a conference, and we ended up talking about our mutual love of animals. She grew up on a farm with livestock and wildlife and, like me, has had various companion animals throughout her life. While her work right now centers on her role on the Hubble Space Telescope oversight team, she startled me when she said making animals happy is one of her callings. She’s never worked professionally with animals and doesn’t have any pets right now, but even so, she says, “Whether it’s helping a worm on the asphalt get back to its natural soil, or doing what I can to help wildlife and animals in farms and labs be treated with holistic mercy and respect, it is perhaps the strongest yearning deep within my soul.” For Jennifer, this is a calling. It is far more than a source of income and more than just something she does on a regular basis; it’s part of who she is.

Sometimes, people will leave a role and explain their departure by saying God has “called” them elsewhere. At times, I wish they’d simply say, “Hey, I decided I want to do this new thing.” Because surely that is the case at times.

Life is long and full. We do lots of things and take on many different tasks and roles. It might be that only in looking backward or amid a crisis or turning point do we see the way in which all the aspects are woven together into a kind of tapestry that depicts our true callings.

It’s also good to enjoy doing things that you aren’t good at and that aren’t centrally connected to your calling. Complications arise when one assumes that passion or enjoyment equals calling.

Perhaps by understanding the important distinction between passion and calling, we can have clearer categories for both and for their relationship to each other. And who knows? Persistence might pay off. Sometimes the right connection at the right moment between caller and called can take an excruciating amount of time – or planning (the way some parents and coaches make sure their kids and players will be seen by scouts).

There are also those who are called to something but do not feel passionate about that calling – and might even resist it.

One of my favorite examples of someone called and not at all happy about it comes from “The Collar,” another poem by George Herbert. The speaker of the poem, as we gradually understand in reading along, is a minister, a man who wears a collar. At first, we don’t know whom he is speaking to, but his speech turns out to be a long monologue delivered in a fit of temper to God. The poem begins with him striking a table and saying, “No more!” He “will abroad,” meaning he’s hitting the road, getting out, giving up:

I struck the board, and cried, “No more;
     I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
     Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
     Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
     Before my tears did drown it.
           Is the year only lost to me?
                Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
     All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
     And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh­blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
     Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
     And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
     Away! take heed;
     I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears;
     He that forbears
     To suit and serve his need
     Deserves his load.”
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
     At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
     And I replied My Lord.

Frustrated and disappointed at the lack of harvest for his labors, angry at God for seemingly not seeing his toil and despair, anxious and angry about the failures in his work and ministry, the speaker sputters and rages, line after line, accusation after accusation. He stops only when he hears the God he is addressing reply with one simple word: “Child.” And the called responds to the Caller (notice the pun on “collar”), “My Lord.”

What a picture of true calling. God’s call “is not the echo of my nature,” Oswald Chambers says, in an echo of Herbert’s poem. Rather, God’s nature can overcome our own limited nature:

When we speak of the call of God, we are apt to forget the most important feature, viz., the nature of the One Who calls. There is the call of the sea, the call of the mountains, the call of the great ice barriers; but these calls are only heard by the few. The call is the expression of the nature from which it comes, and we can only record the call if the same nature is in us. The call of God is the expression of God’s nature, not of our nature.

The “threading of God’s voice to us,” as Chambers describes it, weaves together the unique particularities of our individuality and our circumstances, allowing us to hear that call. Chambers explains, “There are strands of the call of God providentially at work for us which we recognize and no one else does.” Indeed, Chambers says (as is captured in Herbert’s poem), “To be brought into the zone of the call of God is to be profoundly altered.”

The idea of George Herbert, a seventeenth-century Cambridge educated priest, experiencing such a clear sense of calling is one thing. But how are we ordinary folks in this frenzied modern world, which brings us so many choices, supposed to hear our calling amid all the noise? (By the way, not even Herbert followed a straight path to his ultimate vocation: he served in Parliament earlier in life and didn’t enter the priesthood until his thirties. Herbert is now mainly remembered for his poetry, most of which wasn’t published until after his death.)

We can still find joy in vocations that are not perfectly aligned with our passions or desires. When God plants desires in us, those desires can serve as a compass to give us direction. As Frederick Buechner’s famous definition of vocation reminds us, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep need meet.” But deep gladness isn’t necessarily the same thing as passion. As Christians – or even just decent people – it is possible and desirable and even simply human to delight in helping others, to be glad to be of help. “The moral will of God determines that each believer should use his gift for the common good.”

Thus, the doctrine of vocation emphasizes what God does through our work rather than what we do. We give our best efforts, and the failures, as well as the successes, are ultimately God’s business. Such failures are exactly what the speaker in “The Collar” is struggling with. The doctrine of vocation turns the usual question on its head. As Veith writes, “Instead of ‘What job shall I choose?’ the question becomes ‘What is God calling me to do?’”

I have no secret formula, surefire plan, or six steps to success in finding your one true calling!

But I can point you in the right direction. I can point you to truth, goodness, and beauty.

I believe that if you pursue truth, goodness, and beauty in all your work, all your play, all your ways, and all your days, you will find your calling. In fact, I think pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty is your calling. It’s my calling. It’s everyone’s calling.

Excerpted from You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful by Karen Swallow Prior (Brazos, 2025). Used by permission.