Discovering Your Vocation

Vocation, says Frederick Buechner, is "the kind of work
(a) that you need most to do, and
(b) the world most needs to have done."

Buechner explains: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." (Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC, pp 118-119.)

Simply put, vocation is work – you may or may not get paid for it - that makes your heart sing. Vocation is what you are driven to do, that thing that energizes you even while you are exhausted, that frustrates you even while you are fulfilled, that calls you out of yourself.

Vocation is the outward and visible sign of a sacramental partnership with God - the result of our reckless/audacious/unselfconscious offering of our embodied resources in service and submission to the divine. Though many people speak of having a vocation as something limited to clergy alone, the truth is that each and every person is created by God to live into a role that no other person can fulfill. In finding that place we live into the dream God has for our lives.

How do we discern what we have to offer, and how and where God might be calling us to put it into practice? Discernment of vocation is a lifelong task, a day-by-day process that is experienced much more as a journey than as a destination. Clarity about vocation can mean finding, at least for a time, a sense of deep and rewarding partnership with God. But almost certainly, over time that clear understanding will grow hazy as God calls us out of our comfort zone and back into a renewed process of discernment.

How Do I Begin?

Finding our vocation begins with a restlessness that sends us in search of wholeness. It's not a simple or linear process. Along the way, four fundamental practices can advance the process:

• deepening our relationship with God;
• growing in self-understanding;
• developing supportive partnerships in community; and
• engaging in an intentional cycle of action and reflection.

These four fundamentals - rewarding in themselves - combine to lead us into a partnership with God that enriches and gives meaning to our lives.

Deepening our relationship with God can lead us to a deeper understanding of the dream God has for us and provide a foundation for discernment.

Start with forming a rule of life - a personal pattern of worship, private prayer, study and reflection - that you observe with consistency.

Discipline yourself to pay attention to the times and circumstances where you see God in action. Develop the habit of giving thanks, what Alcoholics Anonymous calls "an attitude of gratitude."

Reflect on how you can ally yourself with God's action. Increasing our self-understanding enables us to recognize our own strengths and limitations, equipping us for a "reality check" against our own ego and the illusion of self-sufficiency. Various tests and assessments, coupled with feedback from friends and colleagues, help keep this process honest.

Take an assessment of your spiritual gifts, remembering that our spiritual gifts point to what we are uniquely equipped to do, rather than what we can't do.

Discover your personality strengths. There are many instruments available to help with this process, which can help clarify your working relationships with others. Understand what issues, groups, and causes inspire and energize you. This can indicate where you are called to serve.

Consider your style - your innate preferences and traits. Are you an introvert or an extrovert, a lark or an owl, an equipper or a server, an initiator or a sustainer? This can help you understand how you can best work with others.

Cultivate the habit of self-awareness. Be observant of when you find yourself energized and joyful, and when you're drained by what you are doing. When you engage your vocation, you experience God's power working in and through you. Developing supportive partnerships in community is the essence of the Christian life. Small groups, prayer partners, spiritual directors, ministry teams all help nurture our partnerships with God and with others and support our process of discerning vocation.

Make the effort to partner with someone else in your ministry. Jesus never sent the apostles out one-by-one. Practice "two-by-two." Listen to the insights your community can offer in your discernment process. Clarity about vocation is the fruit of relationships, not of tasks.

Even if you're uncertain of your calling, engage your faith in action. Do something in service to God and to others. The process may lead you toward your vocation, or it may show you where you're definitely not called. Either way, your discernment process benefits.

Keep a journal, make notes, or in some other way capture the insights from your discernment process. Reading or recalling your progress on the journey provides encouragement when further growth seems impossible.

These fundamentals for discernment can be useful both for individuals and for congregations or communities seeking to claim their vocations. The process calls for deep listening, intentional action, and, sometimes, faithful waiting. In living into our vocations we experience a partnership with God, empowered to serve as co-creators, ministers, and icons.

Demi Prentiss

Demi is a member of the staff at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, San Antonio, TX

Career Coaching

Most of us think about sports when we hear "coaching." In sports, the athlete does the work; the coach helps refine the work. Professional coaching goes beyond that. Coaches don't just elicit greatness; they expand the client's world. As one coach says, "Coaches have large toolkits for turning Big Ideas into Reality." Some coaching is done face-to-face, but most is done by telephone which means your coach can literally live anywhere in the world. Most coaches offer a free session to see whether they are a good choice for meeting your needs.

Career coaching is different from career counseling. It can provide all of the self- assessment tools available through career counseling, but it goes beyond by walking you through not only the process of getting a job, but of building a new life.

To find out more about coaching, go to The International Coach Federation (ICF)

To find a coach, go to:

• The San Antonio Professional Coaches Association
• Coachville, the world's largest coaching site
• ICF

For free help in finding the right coach for you, contact Dick Copeland, Certified Career Coach. Call (210) 822-9269 or email Link coaching@richardcopeland.com

Also available from Dick Copeland:
The Extreme Self Care checklist;
How to Have a Perfect Life self assessment;
The Quality of Life 100 checklist.

Books to Help

Annual Discernment Weekends

Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin stages their annual Visitors Weekend every March at the seminary. The vocation discernment event is for those who want to explore calls both to ordained and lay ministry. ETSS offers a master of arts in Divinity and Lay Ministries such as pastoral ministry and counseling that is especially for working people who want to enhance what they do (or plan to do) in secular or church-related jobs. The certificate programs in youth ministry and Christian education are designed especially for church professionals. For more information go to www.etss.edu

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