The Difficulty Discerning Calling by Dr. Bryan McGraw

In this second post from his chapter Dr. Bryan McGraw discusses how we are called. Are we called once for all and then just execute this calling? Or, is calling more fluid and difficult to discern? McGraw argues that for many of us our notion of calling has changed over time. We have not ended up where we thought but this process has not been a deviation from God's plan. Rather, it is has been part of it.

How do we discern our calling?

For many (perhaps most), discerning calling means trying to get a long-range vision for your life and a detailed, executable plan for how to get there. To discern one’s vocational calling is to get as clear-eyed as possible about our gifts, talents and goals and then envision a path toward their realization. I once had a student who in her first advising session here at Wheaton sat down in a chair opposite me, flipped open a laptop and proceeded to describe how her color-coded Excel spreadsheet showed how she could complete a double-major in three years and set herself up for a career in the State Department.  She knew exactly what she wanted to do career-wise and what she needed to do to get there.  Few of us, I suspect, have this student’s drive or organizational acumen, but we nonetheless see in her perspicuity a kind of ideal in relation to vocation.  To discern one’s vocational calling is to get as clear-eyed as possible about our gifts, talents and goals and then envision a path toward their realization.  

The difficulty with this idea of calling is that almost none of us (at least those of us with a certain, ahem, maturity) can cast a look back ten years or more and not be a bit amazed at life’s twists and turns.  Do we ever really have clarity of vision?  Or, perhaps more to the point, does our supposed clarity ever work out just as we had planned?  I’m rather doubtful.  What seems more likely to me is that we are all almost always stuck in that muddle, but that it’s not always a bog, a trap for the unwary, but it is in reality a set of opportunities for rethinking and living out our vocation.  We might even say that our circumstances, especially the unexpected ones, can be particularly important to our vocational call.

The truth is that we are not in control of where we end up (at least not entirely, maybe not even mostly) and we should reflect seriously on how where we end up ought to shape our vocational vision. To the degree that I think of my current context as standing in the way of what I am supposed to be doing, I am missing my actual vocational call precisely because I have misconceived how I am to discern that call. To be faithful in a particular context is, first, to recognize that context for what it is and then ask, given that context, how we might best act with an eye (maybe two!) on what we take to be God’s call then and there.  This does not simplify our discernment—probably quite the opposite.  But I think it avoids the error of believing that a proper understanding of one’s vocational call at a particular time emerges out of constructing some clear, final vision for life that all too typically sees current circumstances as mere obstacles to its fulfillment.