Career or Call?

TROWEL & SWORD

This and That
Reflections on life and faith

Career or Call?

Harry Burggraaf

“A man can do nothing better than eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who could eat or find enjoyment?
To the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 2)

As a teacher in a Christian school I often discuss the nature of work and employment with my students. It is one of the areas where I hope to bring a Christian framework of understanding and a Biblical perspective. The concept of work has changed dramatically over the last twenty years and the work place can be a battle ground of conflicting expectations. Corporate mergers, redundancies, the loss of old crafts and the emergence of new jobs, multi-skilling and re-training, job sharing, long term unemployment and underemployment, all create a confusing picture of change. Young people today view work differently than their parents and certainly differently than their grandparents.

Some people find their work engaging, stimulating, challenging, attractive. Others see it as a less than positive experience and conclude with the writer of Ecclesiastes that “the work that was done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it was meaningless, a chasing after wind. I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun.”.

Work, job and career are sometimes a point of discussion in our own household, as our children get their first casual, part time job and finish their university studies and look for employment.

Why do we work? How important is a career? How much should the salary or wage determine our choice of jobs? What should we think about the present trend towards the casualization of the work force? How much loyalty can employers and workers expect from each other? How much has the understanding of work changed over the last few years? Should places of employment make their employees redundant?

As in so many areas of life, parents, the Christian school, the church, need to provide guidance in our thinking about work.

One of Australia’s foremost social commentators, Hugh Mackay, points out that teenagers today have quite different attitudes to work from their baby-boomer parents, who in turn have a different perspective from their parents. We have seen tremendous changes in attitude and understanding about work in the last ten years and this is likely to increase in the next decade. The workplace is undergoing dramatic changes.

In a very helpful article Thomas Addington, the founder of ‘Life@Work’, suggests that a Christian understanding of work begins with the distinction between ‘career’ and ‘calling’. We can have a career, or we can live a calling. He claims that our English word “career” comes from a Latin word for “cart” and the French word for “circular racetrack”. So the word picture for career is pushing a cart in a circle – a kind of medieval picture of a treadmill. However, “Calling is not treadmill living. Calling is being released to be exactly who I am supposed to be, doing exactly what I am supposed to do.”

As Christians we need to re-capture the Biblical idea of ‘calling’.

Calling is Christ’s personal invitation to me to work on his agenda, using talents I’ve been given, in ways that are eternally significant.

In the Bible people are called to a range of specific work assignments – to teach, to preach, to prophecy, to migrate to another country, to build a boat, to exercise craftsmanship, to lead a nation. Calling is not just for missionaries and ministers, but also for plumbers, consultants, artists, farmers, occupational therapists, accountants, and everything across the board.

To be called, we have to listen to God when he speaks and do what he asks us to do.

And calling can be to work in many shapes and sizes – full time employment, casual tasks, short term contracts, life long vocation, fixed term projects - as long as we are responding to God’s invitation and active within God’s agenda in this world.

Calling assures a greater integration between our work life and the rest of life. It provides purpose (because we are about God’s agenda), meaning (because it has the stamp of divine significance) and satisfaction (because we receive the task as God’s gift).

The writer of Ecclesiastes captures the difference between calling and career. ‘Satisfaction in my work, received from the hand of God’, contrasted, with ‘storing stuff up for someone else’.

If I am called by Christ to what I’m doing, then my work has meaning and I gain satisfaction from it, no matter what it is. And not all the tasks we are called too are necessarily enjoyable or easy. Some may be menial and go unnoticed. Some may test us to the limit and require immense sacrifice and self denial. However, if I am not called by God to what I’m doing, I’m on a treadmill, dancing to someone else’s tune and agenda.

Whatever the shape of the future workplace, it is important that we are called to whatever we do, and see it as a project of service to God.

“May God call us personally to do his work and to help accomplish his agenda, using talents we’ve been given, in ways that are eternally significant.
May God release us to do the exact work he has for us right now.
May God give us incredible passion, excitement, and enthusiasm for accomplishing our calling.” (Thomas Addington)

(Harry is a teacher in a Christian school and a member of the Christian Reformed Church of Dandenong)

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