Finding Our Vocation Through Relationship

If God has given us anything important to accomplish, we should not expect to have all the abilities to complete our assignment or to get it done by ourselves without the encouragement of others. This is true of everyone of us, in every calling.

-Philip Ryken

Why do we work? Enter this question into a search engine and a plethora of links to blogs and articles will pop up. They are all in one way or another trying to address the widespread feeling that our work should have a deeper purpose than making money. According to a BBC article , 82% of respondants in a 2020 survey said they wanted to work for a company with a purpose. Another article cited a Gallup poll noting that 63% of workers feel unengaged by their work. An article in Fast Company cites a New York times poll concluding that 50% of workers do not find meaning or purpose in their work. Most of these articles try to offer methods or advice to address the lack of meaning or fulfillment at work, and all would agree that money is in itself not a satisfactory goal for work; however they differ in their views of work and what it means to find fulfillment or meaning at work. In this post I want to lay out how viewing work (and other aspects of life) through the lens of a divine calling can impact our view of ourselves and our place in our community.

All of this begs the question of why are we dissatisfied with our work in the first place? In one sense, work seems like the most natural thing in the world. Throughout human history, our very survival has necessitated work to merely survive. Deer will not roast themselves over a fire, and neither will squash or potatoes plant and harvest themselves. Existence demands that tasks such as constructing places of shelter, making weapons to defend our home and family, and producing goods to trade with those friendly to us must be accomplished. So how did we come to the place where we find our work meaningless? Why do we search for meaning in our work at all?

Meaning is found in pursuing our calling in relationship to accomplish a goal that allows us to discover and use our gifts to serve others – if we have lost our sense of meaning it is because we have lost our sense of relationship to God, to those around us, and to ourselves. We can understand how this happened by taking a closer look at the biblical book of Genesis. Genesis contains two of the foundational stories of Christianity: The creation story and the story of Adam and Eve. In the creation story we are told of a few key details concerning the nature of God, the nature of the universe he created, and our nature as humans. God is a God who is active and creative (as opposed to an inanimate life force or something along those lines). God ‘worked’ in order to bring about the universe in which we live. God is relational desiring both relationship with us and – in a way completely bewildering to us – desiring relationship within himself through the three members of the Trinity. We learn further that the world was made ‘good’ with everything necessary for human existence provided. And as the story moves along we come to the point where humanity enters the scene;

“The God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock, and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them. “

Genesis 1:27

Few verses in the Bible contain the profound significance of these verses. Theologians have debated precisely what meaning is being conveyed with the phrase ‘created in the image of God’; but the suggestion that within each one of us is contained a reflection of the character of God, however dim that reflection might be, is a revolutionary thought. If God is a creative, relational God who worked to bring about the universe; then we who are made in his image will also have with in us both the drive and the need to seek relationships and to contribute our work or labor to the greater whole. Together, these two factors contribute most of what we are looking for when we talk of seeking meaning through work; to be able to feel our talents and gifts are used to do something valuable, and to undertake this task within the context of a community that both appreciates what we do and encourages us to do it better.

As the creation story continues, we are introduced to probably the most famous couple in human history: Adam and Eve. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of the beginning of humanity, and as such we can glean quite a bit from it about how we were intended to live and work.

It is the story, taken from the third chapter in the book of Genesis, that details how Adam and Eve were deceived by a serpent to disobey God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Life (contrary to popular belief, nowhere is an apple mentioned in the story). The resulting consequences were that Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Paradisal Garden of Eden (which indicated a severed relationship with God), and three ‘curses’ were pronounced by God first on the serpent, then on Eve, and lastly on Adam. For our purposes, I want to focus on the curse placed on Adam:

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat food from it

all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow

you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3: 17-19

These verses indicate that a significant change has taken place in our relationship with our work as a result of this severed relationship with God; the ‘curse’ in the passage describes the hardships and difficulties associated with future labor- a curse on the ground, painful toil, and undesirable weeds and thorny plants growing to compete with the crops. The strong suggestion is that work was going to be much more difficult in this new world Adam and Eve were now living in.

There are three points to take away here:

1. We are made in the image a God who works, is active, and creative

2. Consequently work was originally a good thing

3. We now live in a world that operates under the principles of The Fall, and therefore work has been

corrupted from it’s original intention

These statements are statements about the nature of our world, and understanding them gives insight into why we struggle to make sense of our lives. We are trying to find purpose and meaning apart from our connection to God, and losing this connection has caused us to lose a true sense of who we are and who we are meant to be. We are also living in a world that is in some sense, far more deeply than any of us truly understand, broken and twisted from what it is originally meant to be. Add to that, as I discussed in my last post, our natures turned more inward with pride, selfishness and greed now beginning to intrude into our thoughts and desires. Our desire to put ourselves first put us into conflict with our original nature that was made to seek God first, and then relationship and love with other people. This conflict makes it harder to discover our true gifts and calling as we cannot fully discover who we are apart from God and each other. What so many of the websites I mentioned at the beginning of this post miss is the relational aspect of finding our vocation; it is through our daily interactions with each other that God can show us what our gifts are and how then are best used to serve others. It is how we grow. Discovering our vocation is not about a personal quest to find our inner happiness, rather inner happiness is a by product of seeing our gifts and talents used as a part of God’s redemptive plan to bring healing and restoration to our broken world.

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