3 Questions for Discerning Your Calling by JORDAN RAYNOR for Relevant Magazine
If our work is ever going to be more than a job, we must ask good questions.
The renowned British novelist Dorothy Sayers once said that, “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”
It’s hard to take issue with Sayers’s assertion that we should do work that fully expresses our gifts and brings us “spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction.” But to view work as the means in which we offer ourselves up to God? That sacrificial view of work is almost totally foreign to us today. When discerning our career paths, almost all of our questions are aimed at serving ourselves, rather than God and others. We ask, “Which career will earn me the most respect and adoration from others? Which career will help me accumulate the most wealth in the shortest amount of time? Which career will give me the most freedom and flexibility?”
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With questions like these, it’s no wonder that a record number of us are choosing the path of entrepreneurship, which holds the promise of coolness, the prospect of riches, and the potential for relative freedom. The fact that all three of these things ultimately come down to our identity is no surprise. Almost nothing shapes our identity more than our chosen work. It’s why “What do you do?” is the first question you are asked when you meet someone for the first time. Our identities are so wrapped up in our answers to that question that it is almost irresistible not to choose a career based solely on which job will help us best cultivate the image we want to portray to the world. But as Christians, our identity is already defined. We are children of God! Because of the gospel, our work can become the expression of our identity rather than the source of it.
It’s never been cooler to be an entrepreneur or culture-creator. But cool doesn’t equal calling. If our work is going to be more than a job—if it’s going to be a true calling on our lives—then we must ask questions not about which career will best boost our self-image, but about how we might best serve God and others. After all, our work can only be a calling if Someone calls us to it and we work for their sake and not our own.
In my book, Called to Create, I paint a picture of what it looks like to live out the call to create by telling the stories of 40+ Christian entrepreneurs and creatives including the founders of TOMS Shoes, Charity: Water, Guinness, Chick-fil-A, and In-N-Out Burger. The entrepreneurs and creatives I interviewed for the book tended to ask three excellent questions when discerning God’s calling on their lives:
