Three Callings for Your Life and for Our Time | The On Being Project

God enters our lives as a call from the future. It is as if we hear Him beckoning to us from the far horizon of time, urging us to take a journey and undertake a task that, in ways we cannot fully understand, we were created for. That is the meaning of the word vocation, literally “a calling,” a mission, a task to which we are summoned.

When we talk about finding a calling, we’re not just seeking an activity. We’re looking for an identity, an understanding of who we are. We want to be complete, to make sense of the story of our lives. But whether we recognize it or not, this quest we’ve been talking about is not just a physical one; it’s a spiritual one. It is, in a way, a journey

Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled Hopeful Imagination, suggests that “a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,” and notes that “the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,’ one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.”