Finding worthwhile work

In her latest book, You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good & Beautiful (Brazos Press, 160 pp.), English professor Karen Swallow Prior has delivered a book whose small size belies its considerable wisdom.

Far from a spangly, quick, self-helpy read, it’s worth buying for a recent graduate. Or for someone wondering if he’s stuck in the wrong job. Or even for someone who doesn’t get paid for her work at all.

It’s a book of hope—albeit practical hope. On one hand, Prior acknowledges that vast scores of people, past and present, don’t get to choose a career in line with their passions. She also evokes Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” to remind us how few people of history make a splash, that there “may be little essential difference between these ­anonymous souls and the great, remembered names of history beyond their circumstances.”

You Have a Calling Karen Swallow Prior

She’s delivering the tough pill every ’90s kid was warned by Disney not to swallow: Many people have died in obscurity. You will likely die in obscurity, and that is 100% OK.

But that fact hardly means your work doesn’t matter. Au contraire. It’s OK to die in obscurity when God remembers you. Our work matters because work is good; because we’re working in God’s economy of plenitude, not lack; and because God creates each of us according to His plans and gives us desires that draw us toward His purposes. She asks: “When was the last time you thought of your work as the medium—the paint, the film, the ink, the lead, the stage, the viola, the field, the boardroom, the Zoom call, the dough, the sewing machine, the knitting needles—for God’s creative activity?”

Other books have thoroughly traced the concept of vocation through church history into the present. Prior quotes several of these books, including my favorite, Gene Veith’s God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Crossway 2011).

What sets her book apart, though, is a vision of life that can be arrived at only through reading copious amounts of great literature—and reading not to dissect but to enjoy and acquire wisdom. For instance, Prior writes: “The idea of having a calling slowly evolved from holding a spiritual office (whether in the church or family) into making a living and having worldly success.”

To illustrate this point she repairs not to a history book but to Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Moll Flanders. For help discussing discouragement in toil she turns back four centuries to Welsh poet George Herbert and “The Collar.” For illustration of what happens when our internal passions and outward calling finally collide, she appeals to Jane Eyre.

It’s worth noting that Prior’s prose in You Have a Calling does not feel like a lecture, and in addition to illustrating her points with examples from classic literature, she’s not above alluding to Pam Beesly of The Office, whose pursuit of art school ended in failure.

Any book called You Have a Calling should invite self-examination, and this one does. In that way it reminds me of Emily P. Freeman’s The Next Right Thing. “If your work is taking you along a course that you do not love,” Prior warns, “it might be time to get off the train before it carries you further and further in the wrong direction.” But she also writes of the underappreciated benefits of staying in one workplace for a long period, since we often grow passionate about what we devote our time to.

This seemingly contradictory advice feels like an echo of Proverbs, which, like all great literature, recognizes that in the vast array of human experiences a variety of statements can be true at once. “I’m afraid I have no secret formula, surefire plan, or six steps to finding your one true calling,” Prior writes. “I’m sorry.”

But wise readers will not be sorry. They’ll be reassured.