Vocational Defintion

There’s nothing quite as depressing as entering your receipts in Quicken and seeing where you stand financially (who balances their check book anymore? that’s such an antiquated term). Unless you’re loaded, I suppose. Then it’d be kind of fun.

I made it worse tonight by running a year end report so I could send some figures to the tax guy. Sheesh. Surprisingly, I actually made some money this year, and considering I started my own business that’s amazing. Every day I’m surprised that I can still do this freelance writing thing. I keep expecting to tell my wife, “Well, that’s it. I better call up Target and see if they have any openings.”


It sure feels that way sometimes. Though looking at the numbers, I made a decent wad of cash. Not decent as in I can pay off my loans or buy the wife a big Christmas present. Not even decent as in as good as I was doing at a major non-profit. But decent compared to McDonald’s. That’s something, right?

Of course I still need to pay taxes. I still have the year end total on my loans and mortgage, and that’s enough to make you cry. The loans just kill me. I can handle the mortgage, but the loans are truly depressing. We’re paying them off as fast as we can, but it just doesn’t go fast enough. Thankfully we don’t have any credit card debt. We were both just wise enough to avoid that trap.

The other day I read the book Understanding God’s Will by Kyle Lake (while I did read it to review it, it’s not nearly as boring as it sounds). It’s basically about getting away from the idea of God’s will as some grand sweet spot, and instead focusing on the process of following God. It’s the journey, not the destination (can there really be a destination, this side of heaven?).

Anyway, it made me think about vocation and how in the western world that’s how we define people. A few years ago I was at one of those couples’ lunches with several other couples from church (as hokey as it sounds, it’s actually how we got to know some really great folks and get more involved in the church). As part of normal conversation I asked one of the guys what he did, and I think I really offended him. He didn’t want to be defined by his job, and that’s what I was trying to do. I didn’t mean any harm in it and we’re all certainly over it, but it really illustrates this idea of defining yourself by what you do. It’s crazy, really.

My dad worked as an engineer for Ford Motor Company for 30 years–but he’s retired now. He’s done. Does his vocation still define him? Maybe some of the aspects of the job will be with him forever, but I’d guess those aspects were always there and always will be. I’ve never really seen my dad strictly in vocational terms. True he loves cars and much of his life revolves around cars, but that always had little to do with his day job, or at least that’s how it seemed to me.

Since I’ve stepped away from a 9-5 job, I’ve come to define myself less in terms of vocation. Certainly it’s part of me. If anything my vocation is just that much closer to who I am now, but at the same time I’m able to step away from it. I’m not tied to the 9-5 tedium (though perhaps that just means I get by on less).

I have a few friends at church who would take a similar view of vocation. One of them is a college graduate who holds down three separate jobs. It’s so not the traditional route, and I love that. He’s not defined by his vocation. He needs to earn money, and he does, but he does it on his own terms. There’s another guy who’s been in between jobs for a while now.

I don’t know. It just seems like these different folks have given me a glimpse of life outside the usual job place definitions. There’s something freeing in that.

In Downtown Dandelions, Sedgewick talked about this a fair amount. He concluded that you have to make money, you have to make a living. What does it matter how you decide to do it? That doesn’t define who you are, no matter how much society likes to make us think it does.

That’s my rant for the night. I love these long rants. If you go on just long enough you lose everybody on the way and no one’s left when you finally finish and get to the comments. ;-)

2 thoughts on “Vocational Defintion”

  1. I’m left!

    I can totally agree that the whole of a person isn’t contained in their 9 – 5 job, but I don’t see that it doesn’t give an extremely significant insight into who they are. If you do something 40 hours per week (or 50, in more cases), it seems that it must have something to do with the core aspects of your personality. And if it doesn’t… well… why don’t you get a different job? I mean, you’ve gotta be there that long anyhow, you may as well be passionate about it.

  2. See, that’s my point. We put that much importance into what you do for that 40 hours per week. Some of us are lucky enough that we can decide, OK, I’m going to find a job I love for 40 hours a week. But not everyone has that choice. Some people just have to find a job they can handle and they go in and do it every day. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but we tend to look down on it, as if they’re not living up to their potential or not trying hard enough.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *