Following Jerry Sittser, a previous post of July 19, 2020 titled *The Will of God:
. . . . a calling is not the same thing as a career, though the two are related. A career involves some kind of socially useful work. It usually requires specific education or training, promises advancement, provides compensation, and produces something considered valuable to society.
A career serves the needs, welfare, and interests of the larger society. Thus, engineers design cars, which assembly line workers assemble, executives advertise, car dealers sell, insurance agents insure, commuters drive, and mechanics fix, until the cars end up in the junkyard. Then junk dealers sell them for used parts until there is nothing left but rusted metal, which owners of foundries buy and use for scrap metal to make steel for another round of automobiles. Careers, in other words, function symbiotically, creating a circular system that keeps perpetuating itself as if it were a kind of economic ecosystem.
There are three possible problems with careers. First, not everyone’s calling fits into a specific career. Sometimes people work at jobs because they need the income, though the labor they provide has little to do with their deepest interests and motivations. In my younger years I piled lumber, shoveled coal, flipped burgers, built apartments and sold shoes because I needed the money. All were productive jobs and now provide me with hilarious stories to tell my kids or use as sermon illustrations, but none embodied my sense of calling. Some people spend their entire lives doing work that offers little satisfaction and little sense of calling because they have families to support and bills to pay. We even have a phrase for that: “dead-end jobs.”
Second, sometimes a career can actually prevent a person from discovering or pursuing a calling. A career has incredible power to socialize people within its own area. When a professional basketball player justifies a strike by arguing that he simply wants to make enough income “to provide for his family”—never mind that professional athletes make more in one year than most people do over a lifetime—we see the results of socialization. A career can cause a person to embrace values that advance his or her own interests or those of a social group, not the needs of society.
I think of a young student who aspires to be a medical missionary in the Third World. Years later, however, he finds himself settled in a comfortable suburban practice that supports his lavish lifestyle. “I had to think about my professional security and advancement,” he insists. Or a woman is inspired during her college years to pursue a law degree so that she can provide legal service in the inner city. But she ends up handling messy, but profitable divorce cases. She excuses her change of direction by saying, “There is no money in justice.” ~ Jerry Sittser, the Will of God as a Way of Life (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000,2004) p.162-63 (continued)
