Protect yourself: find your true vocation

...Too many business people "have cut short their careers just before breaking into senior management in order to ‘serve God full time,'" Tonkowich notes. Despite their talk about all work being sacred, their own decisions deny their words.

How do we get back a biblical view of work? We can start with an essay by Dorothy Sayers entitled "Why Work." As Sayers writes, Christians "must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to a specific religious work."

One thinks of a good friend of Sayers, C.S. Lewis, whose "secular" work at Oxford included writing a series of children's books that have for generations pointed children to Christ: The Chronicles of Narnia.

Sayers believed that work "should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery...but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God."

This is why it is so important that Christian young people find out what their vocation is—whether it be law, medicine, ministry, or some other field—and do the work that God designed them to do.

How do we figure that out? We should ask ourselves what we are good at, what we have a passion for, what God has gifted us in. In what kind of work do we find great spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction?

That, Sayers says, is a good indication of the work we should seek out.

Finding the work that God intends us to do may protect us from one of the great temptations of our times: consumerism. Doing our work well, and finding great satisfaction in it, Tonkowich notes, will "keep us from the need to drown out our unhappiness in...[all] the assorted amusements our paycheck can purchase."

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