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Vocation Quotes

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Vocation Quotes

“In truth, as much as her heart panged at the thought that she might never have children, she was content with her lot. God had called her to medicine. Of that she had no doubt. He'd placed a passion within her for scientific learning and a heart that ached on behalf of the hurting. She might never have what other women did, but what she did have was special, and she wouldn't regret making whatever sacrifices were necessary to fulfill her vocation.”

GodWomenSacrificeVocation
Book:At Love's Command
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“A vocation is a terrible thing. To be called out of nature into the supernatural life is at first (or perhaps not quite at first - the wrench of the parting may be felt later) a costly honour. Even to be called from one natural level to another is loss as well as gain. Man has difficulties and sorrows which the other primates escape. But to be called up higher still costs still more.”

SacrificeVocation
Book:Reflections on the Psalms
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“Often we want to be somewhere other than where we are, to even to be someone other than who we are. We tend to compare ourselves constantly with others and wonder why we are not as rich, as intelligent, as simple, as generous, or as saintly as they are. Such comparisons make us feel guilty, ashamed, or jealous. It is very important to realize that our vocation is hidden in where we are and who we are. We are unique human beings, each with a call to realize in life what nobody else can, and to realize it in the concrete context of the here and now. We will never find our vocations by trying to figure out whether we are better or worse than others. We are good enough to do what we are called to do. Be yourself!”

ComparisonBe YourselfUniquenessVocation
Book:Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
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“Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society.”

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Book:The Call
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“Daughter, you are never too young or too old to speak life, to encourage others, to hear from God, and to shepherd others. Whether you are widowed, married, single, divorced—the kingdom needs your voice, your experiences, your testimony. We need your words, your warnings, your hope.”

FaithWomenCallingMinistryVocation
Book:Your Name Is Daughter: What the Unsung Women of the Bible Teach Us about Our Worth
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“The Samaritan woman was the first person Jesus revealed Himself to on His mission. She has the longest recorded dialogue with Jesus of anyone. She was the first missionary before the resurrection. And Mary was the first missionary after the resurrection. Both women. Intentionally sought out by God. Specifically set aside to go and tell.”

ChristianFaithWomenChurchCallingMissionaryMinistryVocation
Book:Your Name Is Daughter: What the Unsung Women of the Bible Teach Us about Our Worth
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“All believers have been called into only one fellowship, which is that of Jesus Christ. Believers may mistakenly consider the group they associate with is one fellowship, and every other group has its own separate fellowship. The truth is, all believers belong to only one fellowship...Since all believers are in the one body of Christ, there should be no divisions in Christ.”

ChurchChristianityGroupsCallingVocationFellowshipDivisiveness
Book:One: Unfolding God’s Eternal Purpose from House to House
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“Suffice to say, the dream writer had a way of phrasing things. She could depict the curve of a cucumber, the shape of a sunbeam, the endearing, velvety tilt of a peach, in just such a way that she earned her living selling dreams. One simply made a selection, read it in solitude, and let it percolate till sleep. People swore they fell directly into her renderings, and one even asked if the dream writer could write a dream of dreaming forever. The dream writer could not do this, but she hired dream apprentices to expand the reach of her dreams and she wrote dreams for herself in which she would sit at a desk, pen in hand, and write even more dreams. This nearly doubled her output.”

WritingDreamsProductivityDreamingVocationPeachesSunbeamsCucumbers
Book:The Little Queen
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“Paul’s mission was profoundly shaped by the way God called him and invited him to reject his life of violence to take on the yoke of peace. Paul became the voice of God to the Gentiles and all those in the wider community who had no place in the inheritance of Israel. Paul began to proclaim that God's narrative of grace, begun with Abraham and Sarah, was meant for all people. Paul's conversion was actually the reconversion of the community of shalom. The community was reminded to be different from other religious communities, and different from the powers and authorities of the world. The community did not repay violence with violence, but practiced peace instead.”

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Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“Some of you may be struggling with discovering your vocation and feeling a little frustrated that your intuition is not helping you more. Alas, intuition can also stand in your way because it makes you aware of too many inner voices speaking for too many different possibilities.”

StruggleDiscoveryIntuitionFrustrationHelpPossibilitiesVocationSensory Processing SensitivitySpsInner Voices
Book:The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
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“At the same time [the contemplative] most earnestly wants everybody else to share his peace and his joy. His contemplation gives him a new outlook on the world of men. He looks about him with a secret and tranquil surmise which he perhaps admits to no one; hoping to find in the faces of other men or to hear in their voices some sign of vocation and potentiality for the same deep happiness and wisdom. He finds himself speaking of God to the men in whom he hopes he has recognized the light of his own peace, the awakening of his own secret: or if he cannot speak to them, he writes for them, and his contemplative life is still imperfect without sharing, without companionship, without communion.”

WritingContemplationVocationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:New Seeds of Contemplation
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“When I heard about spiritual direction, I felt as if I was seeing an old friend I had never met. Spiritual direction (this new old friend) led me deeper into the love of God. Spiritual direction helped me experience more intimately the God of love. And spiritual direction equipped me to be in relationship with others where I could love as I was loved.”

VocationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:Seeking God Together: An Introduction to Group Spiritual Direction
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“Some of the most outstanding spiritual directors in Christian history - like Catherine of Siena and Ignatius of Loyola - either never had an office or orders, or did much of their work of direction before they held such an office. Generally speaking, effective spiritual directors are discovered by the Christian community; they do not put themselves forward without first having others seek their help. Because priests and ministers stand out publicly in the churches as spiritual leaders, most often it is they who have been sought out as spiritual directors. But ordination is not necessary (nor, as we shall see, sufficient) for effective spiritual direction.”

VocationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“Jesus was definitely not inviting these fishermen into a church job or an engaging hobby, which is how many of us understand vocation in the Church today. If we are not careful, our ingrained expectation of a professional class of clergy will quickly sabotage our ability to understand the ministry of Jesus and the disciples. Our bias builds churchy furniture into this story where there is none. We put our church goggles on and read the idea that the disciples called on that seashore were the first priests of the church back into the scripture. They used to make money as fishermen, then they made their money as ministers. (Luke 10:4-11) This was not the case.”

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Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“God invites and God sends all of God's people. This is not a professional or clerical invitation. God's call to ordinary people undergirds all other work done in God's name. The core of everything else the Church does is peaceful human interconnectivity. Decisions about who will do what are marginal. The most important thing the Church does is hear God's voice of shalom. This calling finds its first home in ordinary people living ordinary lives.”

MissionVocationMissional Church
Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“The meaning of vocation, as we have been using it, is a call to "go" on God's behalf. Vocation is about being invited to go be the voice of God. This is not a professional obligation, but rather a dynamic partnership of humans with God that has persisted from the very beginning. Adam and Eve worked with God in the caretaking of the Garden and creation. God walked with them in the evening to survey the work they were doing together. Humans have always been invited to join God and to "work it and keep it." (Genesis 2:15) We are possessed by God's invitation to speak and be a blessing to the world. We are occupied with undoing the violence of the world by ending the cycles of sibling rivalry. Humans are uniquely suitable to this vocation.”

VocationMissional ChurchInivtation
Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“The community of shalom is, by definition, a diversity of people living together. The community of shalom establishes an ethic of peace that incarnates the Body of Christ by going out into the world as the voice of God and rejecting the violence of the world. The polity of the community of shalom differs from the structures and powers of the world and stands as a sign of Christ’s judgment against those structures and powers by virtue of how different it is. The community of shalom embraces the sacrificial giving of self for the other.”

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Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“The work of an apostle, from the first ones sent out by Jesus to anyone aligned with the reign of peace, is to be God's loving word to every part of the world. Echoing the Word, they are sent out to confront the powers and principalities by rejecting state violence and revolutionary violence, and, instead putting on the armor of peace.”

JesusPeaceChurchVocationDiscernmentApostlesMissional Church
Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“Suffice it to say, the ecclesia, the community of peace, imagined on the Galilean seashore had changed. Like a pebble tossed in a pond with ever expanding ripples, the emergence of Christianity in the urban centers of the Roman Empire forced the Church to adopt new forms and structures for mission and ministry. Jesus’s movement became a thriving principality. At the close of the third century, an organized Church had replaced a disorganized but single-minded community on a mission of peace.”

PeaceChurchMissionVocationMissional Church
Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“God’s invitation to vocation also erodes the compartmentalization between our religious and professional lives. In the biblical worldview, the way of peace requires full participation. We cannot claim to be one person in one particular context or set of relations, and then a claim to be a totally different person in another context. There is no such thing as professional holy people. We live complete lives in continuity with God and our vocation is equally operative in every space we inhabit.”

PeaceHolinessMissionVocationChristian FaithMissional Church
Book:Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church
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“Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth to the Ground!”

CallingVocationJohn Barth
Book:The Sot-Weed Factor
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“From the outset, Protestantism rejected the critical medieval distinction between the 'sacred' and 'secular' orders. While this position can easily be interpreted as a claim for the desacralization of the sacred, it can equally well be understood as a claim for the sacralization of the secular. As early as 1520, Luther had laid the fundamental conceptual foundations for created sacred space within the secular. His doctrine of the 'priesthood of all believers' asserted that there is no genuine difference of status between the 'spiritual' and the 'temporal' order. All Christians are called to be priests - and can exercise that calling within the everyday world. The idea of 'calling' was fundamentally redefined: no longer was it about being called to serve God by leaving the world; it was now about serving God in the world.”

WorkChristianitySacredCatholicismSecularVocationMartin LutherProtestantismPriesthood Of All Believers
Book:Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
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“After some pondering, I made a decision that would affect all of my future work and writing in more ways than I could ever have anticipated. It was a decision between seminary and college teaching. More so it was a decision between two very different cultures of New England and the Southwest. I chose seminary teaching in Texas, which was a decision some of my colleague on the East Coast thought was foolish. From then on, as long as I was in the Southwest, I would feel the sting of the silent condescension and stereo typing by Eastern elites who disdained southwestern American culture. Many viewed as inconsequential everything that happened west of the Hudson River. What they disparaged was exactly what I loved, the easy going, unpretentious, common culture of my native landscape in Oklahoma and Texas.”

VocationSouthwestern American CultureTeaching The Faith
Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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“Our task is to announce in deed and word that the exile is over, to enact the symbols that speak of healing and forgiveness, to act body in God's world in the power of the Spirit. Luther's definition of sin was homo incurvatus in se, "humans turned in on themselves." Does the industry in which you find yourself foster or challenge that? You may not be able to change the way your discipline currently works, but that isn't necessarily your vocation. Your task is to find the symbolic ways of doing things differently, planting flags in hostile soil, setting up signposts that say there is a different way to be human. And when people are puzzled at what you are doing, find ways - fresh ways - of telling the story of the return of the human race from its exile, and use those stories as your explanation.”

ResurrectionVocationPentecostEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“Our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.”

ResurrectionVocationPentecostEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“If you are to shape your world in following Christ, you are called, prayerfully, to discern where in your discipline the human project is showing signs of exile and humbly and boldly to act symbolically in ways that declare that the powers have been defeated, that the kingdom has come in Jesus the Jewish Messiah, that the new way of being human has been unveiled, and to be prepared to tell the story that explains what these symbols are all about. And in all this you are to declare, in symbol and practice, in story and articulate answers to questions, that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and Marx, Freud and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and neither modernity nor postmodernity is. When Paul spoke of the gospel, he was not talking primarily about a system of salvation but about the announcement, in symbol and word, that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, the true light of the world.”

ResurrectionVocationPentecostEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ, shaped according to his messianic vocation to the cross, with arms outstretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world an to the love of God. Paul, we should note carefully, is quite clear about one thing: as we embrace this vocation, the prayer is likely to be inarticulate. It does not have to be a thought-out analysis of the problem and the solution. It is likely to be simply a groan, a groan in which the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ, groans within us, so that the achievement of the cross might be implemented afresh at that place of pain...”

ResurrectionVocationPentecostEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.”

ResurrectionVocationPentecostEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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