Interruptions are not distractions by Laura Meitzner Yoder

Laura Meitzner Yoder here challenges us to consider how our professional work brings forth the kingdom of God. She specifically highlights those times when we need to set aside our own plans and priorities to take hold of the God-given interruptions which present themselves so that we can play our part in God’s kingdom story.

No matter where we are in the world or what our professional positions, reflecting on vocation may prompt us to ask, “How does my work today, in this particular context, with these specific people, both express and bring forth the Kingdom of God?”  This question has accompanied me as I have pursued my vocation of university teaching and community-based research on environmental issues in far-flung areas of Southeast Asia.

My teaching and my relationships improved as I increasingly took local circumstances into account, based our studies on local examples, and fully employed elicitive, question-based teaching methods.  This built my appreciation for the ministry of interruptability: a willingness to look beyond my own content-oriented goals in order to improve the educational outcomes, and personal healing opportunities, among my students.  While these circumstances may seem more extreme than those typically found in a North American university classroom, we should be attentive and alert to the potential range of background experiences that students and colleagues may be invisibly carrying into their educational settings.  Compassion and listening are central to an educator’s work.

What differentiates God-given interruptions from distractions is whether they contribute to or detract from our overall purpose.  Here is where being able to distil our core motivations is helpful: articulating a professional life purpose that relocates the center of our universe from our own academic accolades and accomplishments to our supporting roles in God’s Kingdom story is startling in a world obsessed with personal aggrandizement.  The biblical story of the Kingdom of God is so riddled with reversals, inversions, and unexpected outcomes that we should not be surprised to find that God’s Something Big is at odds with the accepted order of things in secular society.  Defining our professional purpose and our life vision in terms of the glimpses we have for God’s agenda in this world releases us from following a standard script for success, and allows us to define the opportunities that come our way in different terms.  We may view Jesus’ call to leave nets and to follow as a nonsensical abandonment of one’s obvious first professional calling and a foolhardy inattention to safeguarding and developing the key tools of the trade--until we are able to put that action in a larger perspective.

--

Author Biography

Laura Meitzner Yoder enjoys learning and teaching about how people make claims to the natural world and how human societies negotiate using and sharing what we claim.  She draws inspiration and hope from over a decade spent with smallholder farmers and forest dwellers in Latin America and Southeast Asia, as they work out their access to land, forests, and seeds.  Most of her overseas positions have bridged the worlds of rural villages and a local university, teaching plant sciences, field research methods, social forestry, political ecology, and environmental anthropology.  Since 2011, she is Associate Professor and Director of the field-based Sustainability Semester at the Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College, Indiana, USA, and continues to spend some months each year in Asia with her husband and young son.  Her publications cover a range of topics including interaction of state and customary authorities in resource regulation, agricultural improvements in marginal production areas, approaches to plant breeding, environmental justice, and institutions that govern the commons.