This summer, along with many of my colleagues, I am reading Steven Garber's book
Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good. I have enjoyed it immensely, but I find I have to read it in small chunks, because there are so many big ideas, and I need to spend some time chewing on them, so to speak.
It is timely that I am reading this book right now, but perhaps not for the reasons you might suspect, given the title of the book. The book
is about vocation--calling--but not in the sense that you might normally associate with the word "vocation." Calling is much more than just your job, your employment, your career. A the very beginning of the book, Garber includes a note explaining his belief about meaning of "vocation," and he suggests we should think about this word as "a rich one, having to address the wholeness of life, the range of relationships and responsibilities. Work, yes, but also families, and neighbors, and citizenship, locally and globally--all of this and more is seen as vocation, that to which I am called as a human being, living my life before the face of God" (from "On Vocation," p. 11).
In the chapters I have read so far, Garber draws upon his experiences working in Washington D.C. as an academic and the leader of a think tank, his friendships with people in powerful positions and lowly ones alike--Senators and students, authors and artists--and weaves their stories together in ways that have brought me fresh eyes to the concept of vocation.
The reading so far has me thinking, "Just what am I called to do?" and this is a little unsettling for me, because I feel like I am just getting comfortable in my work as a professor.
But, as I suggested above, I find the reading of this particular book timely at the moment. If you have been following the news in the United States
at all in the past weeks, you will undoubtably know that there is an incredible sense of unrest. Political rhetoric is burning. Race relations are tense. There have been so many shootings across this country in the past week alone, and my heart aches. Protestors and police alike are in turmoil. And all of it is playing out in social media in painful, hurtful, nasty ways.
This summer, along with many of my colleagues, I am reading Steven Garber's book Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good. I have enjoyed it immensely, but I find I have to read it in small chunks, because there are so many big ideas, and I need to spend some time chewing on them, so to speak.