For the last seven to eight years I’ve really been exploring this idea of vocation, and it seems that it is a topic that I’ve had more and more conversations with people as of late. In fact, I blogged on this topic just a couple of months ago. In my opinion, still one of the best books on this topic is Parker Palmer’s, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.
A few months ago I wrote an article for Catalyst on the intimate connection between identity and vocation. Check out that article, Calling and Identity: The Intimate Relationship.
In my latest book, What it Means to be a Man, I write:
“That’s a concept of work that goes back to Genesis one. God worked and cared for His creation as He created life out of darkness. He made man (Hebrew ‘adam’) in His image, forming him from the ground (Hebrew ‘adamah’) and naming him Adam (an act of sovereign care). The He commanded him to work and care for the land from which he’d been taken (Gen. 2:15) and to care for His creatures by naming them (Gen. 2:19). In the words used and the commands given, we see a deep connection between our identity as men and our responsibility to imitate God in working and caring.” (What it Means to be a Man, pp. 89-90)
Lots to think about on this topic. I will leave you with another article I ran into this week. The Art of Manliness blog on May 16 had an excerpt of Robert Greene’s book, Mastery. In the blog post titled The First Key to Mastery: Finding Your Life’s Task, the excerpt begins with this quote:
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves . . . to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.”Jose Ortega y Gasset
