What is your calling in life? I have asked that question to hundreds of students. Usually, it creates a lot of anxiety. Worrying about what to do with your life can feel like a personal crisis that doesn’t go away.
I feel blessed to do work that I am passionate about. But finding my calling in life was not easy. Several times I felt utterly adrift—as if I had irreversibly missed the path I should have taken. In hindsight, those experiences now provide structure to the pattern of my career and reveal the hand of the Lord leading me to my calling. But I felt much anxiety along the way.
My aim is to encourage you to ponder your life’s work without the anxiety, because when we view our calling in life through a gospel lens, we don’t need to feel anxious.
What is a Calling?
First, what do I mean by a “calling in life”? Martin Luther introduced the idea of a professional calling when his study of the Bible convinced him that God considers work sacred. This was a novel idea at the time. Luther taught that work is how we participate in God’s providence toward His children and that our station in life dictates what work we should do. If you grew up in a cobbler shop, your calling was to make shoes. And by making shoes, you participated in God’s work by covering His children’s feet.
John Calvin elaborated on Luther’s ideas. For Calvin, it wasn’t our social position that determined our callings. Rather, he argued that God endows each of us with particular talents, and that our duty is to discover those gifts and use them to serve others. He taught, “As God bestows any ability or gift upon any of us, he binds us to such as have need of us and as we are able to help” (Sermons of John Calvin upon the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians, p. 307).
So the very roots of professional callings are distinctly religious. Ironically, the world still embraces the notion of a professional calling but has abandoned its spiritual roots. As sociologist Max Weber put it, “The idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 182).
Consequently, society has developed distorted doctrines about finding your calling. I refer to these doctrines as heresies, because if we embrace them, they may lead us away from how the Lord intends us to view our life’s work.
Heresy 1: You might have a calling, or you might not
The first heresy gets right to the heart of our anxiety. It is that you might have a calling if you are lucky, or you might not. Doctrine and Covenants 58:27 helps us dispel this heresy. In this verse, the Lord asks His children to “be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness.” If the Lord asks us to do many things in service to good causes, why shouldn’t our professional work be one of them?
Notice how the very next verse begins: “For the power is in them . . . ” (D&C 58:28). The Lord hasn’t just told you to pursue good causes; He has equipped you with power to do so! You may not yet know what to do with your life, but you are full of divine capacities.
These verses testify that you have a calling to pursue good causes with the power you have been given. But how do you find your particular calling? That’s the burning question for many of us.
Heresy 2: You have to find your one true calling
The anxiety you might feel about choosing a career leads us to the second heresy: you have to find your one true calling to be fulfilled. This heresy should remind you a bit of your favorite fairy tale in which the princess finds her “one true love.” Do the scriptures support this idea?
D&C 46 enumerates many spiritual gifts that you might have been given—gifts of teaching, healing, prophesy, and so on. But notice what verses 11 and 12 say: “For all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby.” The Lord teaches us there are many gifts, which are distributed differently among us and are given so we can bless one another.
Elder Bruce R. McConkie taught, “Spiritual gifts are endless in number and infinite in variety” (A New Witness for the Articles of Faith, p. 371). Might these include spiritual gifts that pertain to our professional work? Yes, in fact, finding our calling involves the same process as discovering our spiritual gifts. As Elder Robert D. Hales explained, “To find the gifts we have been given, we must pray and fast. . . . I urge you each to discover your gifts and to seek after those that will bring direction to your life’s work and that will further the work of heaven” (Ensign, Feb. 2002).
Your spiritual gifts may not lead you to one specific profession, which can feel troubling. Many students say, “I’m not sure what I want to be; I just know I like working with people.” If you think your spiritual gifts are ambiguous, delve deeper. How do you like working with people? Our strongest gifts tend to manifest themselves early in life, so it might be instructive for you to consider how you played as a child. Were you the kid who always got the neighborhood baseball game going? Maybe you have a spiritual gift for organizing people into collective action. Were you a natural storyteller? Maybe you have a gift for presenting ideas in a compelling way. Other types of gifts include encouraging others’ talents, anticipating others’ needs, organizing information, and seeing problems from multiple angles.
These gifts may not suggest a particular career, but they have market value and are portable. You might express them in many professions. Consequently, finding your calling may not be a matter of finding the one right job. Instead, it may be to bring your unique spiritual gifts to whatever position the Lord blesses you with.
Heresy 3: When you find your calling, work will be bliss
The third heresy is pervasive. The media implores you to build a career that is exciting and self-fulfilling. I am certainly an advocate for enjoying your work, but we deceive ourselves when we believe our work must always be fun.
I learned an important lesson from a profession I recently studied: zookeepers. Zookeepers are passionate about their work, even though they make little money and have few opportunities for career advancement. They care for their animals as if they were their own children, and they feel great satisfaction when they enrich their animals’ lives. By and large, they are almost outrageously satisfied with their work.
But is every day fun for zookeepers? Hardly. When zookeepers talked about their work as a calling, they spoke not just about satisfaction but also about sacrifice—caring for sick animals late at night, doing unsavory work, and foregoing a comfortable living. But the pain and sacrifice were not threats to their sense of calling—they were part of it. The work was meaningful because of the burdens.
Joseph Campbell, a professor of literature, introduced the phrase “Follow your bliss” in the 1970s to describe the importance of finding passion in work and in life. Later Campbell developed misgivings about how people used the phrase. He quipped, “What I should have said was ‘follow your blisters.’” You may do the most important, exciting work in the world, but some days will be mundane. You will be called upon to sacrifice. We can’t expect deep meaningfulness from our calling unless we are willing to assume its burdens as well.
Heresy 4: The world will celebrate your calling
A related heresy is that finding a calling means the world will take notice. If you expect the world to loudly applaud your calling, you may be disappointed. This point reminds me of one of the zookeepers I interviewed. One day when he was caring for an animal, a nun came by with a group of students. Within earshot she said, “See the kind of job you get when you don’t finish your education!” Ironically, the zookeeper had a college degree.
I would like to tell you about my friend Barb, who was a custodian at my previous university. She was a tiny dynamo in her mid-fifties. Every afternoon she came into my office, a smiling flurry of activity, to take out my trash. She always asked if there was some task she might do to make my office cleaner. I rarely took her up on the offer, but I came to realize that it made her happy when I did. One day I asked, “Barb, how do you feel about your job?” “I love it,” she beamed. “I’m proud to be part of this school and like making it a better place.” Her enthusiasm made me want to be a better professor. She did make the university a better place.
I challenge you to look for examples of nobility among those who do the so-called menial tasks around you. You will find inspiring examples of people who are using their spiritual gifts to serve in quiet but remarkable ways. We do violence to the souls of those who offer their gifts in less-glamorous ways when we treat them as minor cast members in the great drama of our own professional lives. The Savior saw nobility in “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). And if your calling leads you to work that is less than glamorous, remember that it is a heresy to believe that work is meaningful only when it gives us status.
Heresy 5: Meaning is found in your work
The last and most insidious heresy is the idea that meaning in life is to be found at work. It’s insidious because it’s almost true. Worthwhile work can indeed give us a sense of meaning. But the idea that meaning comes primarily from our work entirely misses the point, because it focuses on the self. Imagine a great artist who creates stunning masterpieces, but then hoards them in her attic, where only she can enjoy them. She may take pleasure in her creations, but it is in enriching others that the artist makes her contribution to the world. The point is that the Lord expects us not to seek meaning for ourselves but to render meaningful service through work. True meaning, as always, comes from service.
Allow me to share an experience from my mission. As I was nearing my release, I was thinking about the sense of loss I expected when I returned home. At zone conference my mission president opened the floor for Q&A. I raised my hand and asked, “After our missions are over, how can we keep a sense of purpose?” Before the mission president could answer, his wife leaped to her feet, elbowed him aside, and said, “I’ll take this one.”
I will never forget her response. She said, “When I am doing the laundry, I am building the kingdom of God. When I am ironing clothes, I am serving the Lord. I have a lot of unglamorous jobs to do, but if my eye is single to God and I’m trying to serve my family, then I feel as much purpose in my work as a missionary.”
The state of our hearts is as important as the tasks we do in determining whether our work is truly—and eternally—meaningful. D&C 117 reinforces this idea. In this section the Lord extends a professional calling to Oliver Granger. He is called to be “a merchant unto my name . . . for the benefit of the people” (verse 14). Two verses later, the Lord promises to “overthrow the money changers in mine own due time” (verse 16). So what is the difference between a merchant unto the Lord’s name and a money changer? Their work must look very similar. But Oliver Granger was to work in service to God and man, not in service to himself. If we work for our own benefit, we move perilously close to becoming money changers.
One of the great gospel ironies is that when we lose ourselves, we find ourselves. Work is much the same. When you focus your work first and foremost on blessing others, you will become extraordinary at what you do. You will find fulfillment and success much more reliably than if you work to get ahead.
Our Heavenly Father is intimately involved in the circumstances that lead us to the places where we are equipped with power to serve. Have faith that your unseen Navigator will lead you to your life’s calling. You can call upon His grace to help you. Knowing that will help you expel anxiety about your calling in life, and it will help you to follow your bliss, follow your blisters, and go forth to serve.
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Speech Given by Jeffery Thompson
About the speaker
Jeffery Thompson is an associate professor of public management in the Marriott School’s Romney Institute of Public Management. This article is adapted from Thompson’s devotional address given on 1 June 2010.
