What Is My Work?
It’s September again. so what should I do with my life?
I think about this question more than most people, I’m sure. Those of us in higher education—at least, those of us worthy of the field—are constantly trying to help young adults find their way in the world. This time of year, we welcome a new crop of freshmen students, wide-eyed and uncertain in the face of their looming adulthood. They want to be teachers and lawyers and medical professionals and a thousand other things. Sixty percent of them will change their mind within the next 18 months. So goes the battle.
A smaller number of their older peers will go through their own occupational crises. As graduation creeps closer, they begin to question their choices in major fields. They begin asking, Is this really what I want to do with my life? I have to help them work through those questions, exploring whether it is better to change course now or complete their degree in their current field before pursuing something else. There is no easy answer, I tell them, but there are multiple right answers. And nobody can choose the path except the person on it.
Offering such helpful perspective is my job. But it’s not my life.
Truth be told, I don’t have things nearly so together as the 20-year-olds in my care would assume. True, I have a job that I (mostly) love which provides me a livable income and a chance to do some tangible good in the world. But I want to do so many other things before I die. Publishing a novel (*shameless plug for Earth, available for download beginning Oct. 11*) is on the list, as is running a bed and breakfast or some such hospitality endeavor. I’ve timed out of playing professional baseball, and my body never cooperated to begin with. Still, I would love to be the beer man at a minor league ballpark. Or maybe a park ranger. Or a librarian or Hebrew Bible scholar.
My head is a noisy place, as you can tell.
But I’m not alone in my occupational ADHD. I know dozens of people thinking about switching careers. One told me this morning that his current plan is to be a school bus driver. “Four hours per day, but you also get benefits,” he said. “And you get to play an important role in those kids’ lives—get them to and from school safely, look out for them on the way. What’s not to love about that?”
What indeed.
The cliches tell us that such thinking comes with certain stages of life—young adulthood, when we are setting the course for our professional lives, and middle age, when we feel trapped by the consequences of those choices. But I think it’s more than that. Judging by a couple of decades of personal observation, I’d guess that most people are constantly inquiring about the nature of their work.
What am I doing with my life? What should I be doing? How do I know if I’m successful? Does any of it matter?
These are questions that can keep your therapist gainfully employed indefinitely. But perhaps they aren’t the most helpful to ask. Lately, I’ve been looking at vocational uncertainty through a more practical lens.
Namely, what is my work?
Framing it this way turns down the volume on the big questions of meaning and purpose and contribution to the larger human project. I don’t have to discover my calling or fulfill my purpose or—apologies to Parker Palmer—let my life speak. I simply have to identify the task before me and do it. A pile of rocks needs moving? Then move the rocks. A friend needs encouraging? Encourage the friend. A diaper needs changing?
Well, hopefully not that. I’ve done my time on that front. But if it comes down to it, I suppose I would do the changing.
Asking what is my work? also adds a personal pronoun—my, as in that which belongs to me. It’s not hard to see that the world has plenty of needs, and also not hard to feel like I am implicated in all of them. To a point, maybe I am. But not every needed task is my work. I only have that which is in my power to do, that which is within my reach. Frederick Buechner taught that vocation resides where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. If God had wanted more from us than that, God should have equipped us to run on 20-minutes of sleep and maybe given us one of Tolkien’s magical rings.
Since a hobbit-esque intervention seems unlikely these days, the best I can do is discern what is my work and then get busy on it. Public perception thinks of ministry as preaching and visiting hospitals and throwing around pithy quotes. I’ve done all those things. But I’ve also had to repair a vacuum with a ball-point pen, seal a roof, teach guitar lessons, construct set pieces for musicals, ride a bicycle for a thousand miles, and build a fire so a friend would have someplace warm and comforting where he could cry.
You’ll never convince me those things don’t represent God’s work just as much as any Bible study I’ve led.
I am fortunate enough that the most meaningful work I do sometimes lines up with what I get paid for. But not always. In any event, my best work is often improvised. I see tasks before me and match them with tools available to me.
More often than you might think, that turns out to be enough.
