How to follow “the true, good, and beautiful” today to find your calling tomorrow
How the advice to “follow your passions” can lead to an unbiblical sense of entitlement, how to follow “the true, good, and beautiful” today to find your calling tomorrow, and how God uses pain and trauma to steer us to our callings.
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0:00:05] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians, those of us who aren't pastors, or religious professionals, but who work as hotel managers, mathematicians, and drywall installers? That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to Dr. Karen Swallow Prior. She's an award-winning author and regular contributor to Christianity Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many other publications.
Karen and I recently sat down to discuss how the advice to follow your passions in the work you love can lead to an unbiblical sense of entitlement. We talked about how to follow the true, good, and beautiful today to find your calling tomorrow. We also talked about how God can use pain and trauma to steer us into our vocations, just as he did with one of my favorite mere Christians in history, Hannah Moore. Trust me, you are not going to want to miss this terrific episode with my new friend, Dr. Karen Swallow Prior.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:14] JR: Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:17] KSP: Thank you for having me.
[0:01:19] JR: Hey, this is a great honor, because I've been a fan of your work from afar for a while now. In August, you're releasing a new book that I am loving, called You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. Listen, as you well know, so many terms are thrown around in this conversation that mean different things to different people. What do you mean by the terms vocation and calling?
[0:01:43] KSP: That is a great question. Those terms I do use, and I think most people do use interchangeably. They do come from the same root word, if we want to get really nerdy.
[0:01:54] JR: We always want to get really nerdy. I'm all about getting really nerdy.
[0:01:58] KSP: The thing that I think is crucial, even beginning to understand these weight-laden terms is that calling and vocation is something that comes from outside of us. When we are called, someone is calling us. That's different from just having a burning desire, or passion, or even gifts and talents. Hopefully, those things do overlap. But calling is answering someone else's call, whether that is the Lord himself, or the Lord using other people and circumstances to show us and call us to the place that he has for us.
[0:02:36] JR: That's really good. I’ve got three daughters, ages five, eight, and 10. We're big Moana fans in this house. We love the Moana films. But we do have to pause the TV and do a little bit of discipleship. Every time Moana sings, “The call isn't out there at all. It's inside me,” I have to pause the TV and be like, “Okay, girls. What's true? What's not true about this? If it's truly a calling, it's got to come from outside of ourselves.” I love that you're doubling down on this biblical message in this book.
In this book, you're really challenging to going after some conventional wisdom that I've challenged in my own books, this passion mindset to calling, this idea to follow your passions to find your calling, to find your vocation. Tell us how you're addressing that conventional wisdom in this book.
[0:03:26] KSP: Yeah. I mean, that wisdom has led to so much disappointment and angst and unnecessary pain and suffering, as I've seen it work out in the lives of my students over the decades. Because following your passion in terms of our work and our vocation leads many people to think that if they have ordinary good work that doesn't fulfill their passion, that they are somehow failing, and that is certainly not true. The Lord does give us desires and passions. Sometimes we develop desires and passions that are not of Him. Even when He does give us these that are part of how He made us, that does not mean that we're going to make money with our passions.
I think that's because we're in this heavily mediated culture with lots of social influencers and media influencers who present these pictures of people making a lot of money by doing easy things, or things that they just enjoy doing, that's just not how life works for most of us now, or throughout history. I think it's helpful to distinguish between our passions, the things we love to do, the things that we're good at, and then the things that we can get paid for that allow us to fulfill our responsibilities in our families and our homes. Sometimes they do overlap, but they most often don't. That's okay, because we can use them all in God's perfect economy, but they just might not all be in one big lump pile.
[0:04:55] JR: Yeah. It's really good. I also think this “follow your passions” mantra, can lead to a very entitled mindset as it comes to work, right? I am entitled to work that I love. The only thing I'm entitled to, because my sin is death, right? Then, when I end with the kingdom of God, the only thing Jesus says, materially I deserve, see Matthew 6 is food, water, clothes, that's pretty much it. Work that I love is a gift of grace. But I think that follow your passions mantra, I don't know the subtext of it can almost presume upon God's grace and act like we deserve work that we love. Does that make sense, Karen?
[0:05:40] KSP: It makes so much sense. I want to go back and revise my manuscript and it's too late. I want to add this in there. That entitlement attitude trap. I didn't say that in my book. I think it's gold. Thank you for saying it. That is a huge trap of that, that we are entitled somehow to get this great sense of self fulfillment and out of our work, which of course, all of us want to have purpose and meaning in our work. I think that the way that God works and even secular science shows this research and I cite some of this in my book, particularly Cal Newport, who does a lot of research on this area.
[0:06:18] JR: Love Cal. Cal is a good friend.
[0:06:20] KSP: Yeah. Oh. Okay. Well, I had no idea. But he shows through his research that often, passion follows experience and competence. In other words, you might take a job and do a role that you're not passionate about, but as you get better at it and as you stay longer and as you become more competent, you begin to love it, because your passion follows that experience. That's very freeing, because it opens up the world for us to be curious and to follow paths we might not follow and discover what we're good at and what we can be passionate about.
[0:06:57] JR: Oh, man. It's so good. Karen, I got to send you a copy of this book I released in 2020 called Master of One. That's probably my favorite book with college students, and I'm riffing a lot off Cal. It's the first way that Cal and I got connected, and particularly his book is so good they can ignore you. I make the case that not only is this passion mindset out of line with the example of Christ, who came to serve rather than be served. It's also just a really bad bet. We've got really good data that, listen, I'm a millennial, right? My generation, the generations after me have had more opportunity than ever to follow our passions and do whatever makes us happy. Yet, all the data suggests, we're the least happy generation at work. I loved, maybe you remember this from Cal's book, but he cited this research from this professor out of Yale, named Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski. Are you familiar with this work at all, Karen?
[0:07:51] KSP: Is this about the study of their college administrative assistants?
[0:07:55] JR: Yes.
[0:07:56] KSP: I cite that in my book. It’s just so fascinating.
[0:07:57] JR: Oh, my gosh. I haven’t gone there yet. All right, do you want to summarize it for our listeners? Because I love this study.
[0:08:03] KSP: Yeah. Basically, they choose this group of professionals, administrative assistants for the precise reason that no one thinks of people as little girls and boys growing up going, “Oh, I want to be a college administrative assistant.” It's not something that sat before them as a dream. They study this group of people and find, basically, that the more likely the subjects were to be passionate about their job correlated with how long they'd been doing it.
[0:08:34] JR: Yeah. I think if memory serves me correctly, I think Dr. Wrzesniewski's replicated these findings across jobs that even kids do want to grow up doing, doctors, computer programmers, if memory serves me right. I love that she started with administrative assistants. No, passion follows mastery, not the other way around. So good.
All right, the passion mindset is wrong. What is right? What's a better, more effective and more importantly, God honoring approach to discerning vocation, because you're talking readers through this in the book, right?
[0:09:03] KSP: Right. Right. Well, my approach is somewhat novel and we'll find out if it works or not, but I think it has some wisdom. My thesis is basically, that if we pursue the true, good, and beautiful in all of our lives, we will find our calling. I break that down. I mean, and that sounds lofty in a way, I suppose. I talk about the transcendentals and Aquinas and Aristotle and Plato, but really, because our work is so much part of our lives, and I don't mean just like our paying jobs. I mean, the mother who is raising children at home is working, and that is a calling.
If you are aiming to be a tennis star on your high school team, that's work. You have to work at it. Everything that we do that we want to be good at, or that we care about requires some effort, or some work. If we pursue that in truth, so for example, understanding the reality of the job, of the role. I talk about how when I was in college, I thought maybe I was an English major, but I didn't know what to do with the degree. I thought, well, I'll do a marketing internship. That's practical. I did an internship in a marketing office downtown in an office with cubicles. I hated it so much that I decided to get a PhD in English, instead of working in an office. But it was a valuable experience. I didn't know what it was like to work in a marketing office. I discovered, oh, I don't like what this really is. We can't just dream about what this job or role is like. We have to know, accept its reality. That's part of pursuing truth. Being good, I mean, I quote Dorothy Sayers extensively. She's so good.
[0:10:55] JR: She's the best.
[0:10:56] KSP: She is. She has a famous essay called Why Work? She's writing this specifically to Christians. Her argument basically is that the best way to be a Christian in your work is to do good work.
[0:11:10] JR: The Ministry of Excellence.
[0:11:12] KSP: Yes. Yes. Exactly. We need to do good work in whatever it is that we do. Then, when it comes to beauty, that's where I get really philosophical and talk about proportion and integrity and luminosity and art and what makes things beautiful. We can apply that to our own lives and our own work by pursuing those same qualities of proportion and giving what is due to the thing that needs that thing at that time and to having integrity and to shedding light through what we do.
One example that I give is of this is just the way my 88-year-old mother, who we lost last year, but she spent a lot of her last years doing a lot of things for children online from home. That meant she had to call a lot of help desks to get help with her computer, or her printer, or this or that. When she would get someone on the other line, probably halfway across the world, who would be patient with her and help her with the technical issue, that just gave her and my whole family so much joy, because someone doing their very technical job would help an 88-year-old lady around the globe understand and do this thing. It was just beautiful. There's so many ways to be beautiful in our work and to shed that light and be that light to other people in the most ordinary things that we do.
[0:12:34] JR: It's good. I like that a lot. Let's take another case study. I'm going to imagine a listener. Actually, this isn't imagine. I know there's a listener listening with this profile. 25-year-old woman, working a corporate job at Hilton in the marketing department. What does it look like for her, knowing basically nothing about her job? I'm sure you can imagine some of it. What does it look like for her to follow the true good, beautiful today as a means of finding her calling tomorrow? What does that look like, practically.
[0:13:02] KSP: Well, again, because I do travel a lot, and so I end up staying in places like that. It's not my favorite thing to do, but it's part of what I have to do. I meet people like this on the other side, and I cannot tell you how much it affects me, how much truth, goodness and beauty I see when someone has some joy in what they're doing, has some competence, has patience. Doesn't necessarily have to know everything, or answer all my questions, but knows how to find them, or help me find the answers.
Then, of course, from her perspective when she's seeing and doing things that aren't visible to me, simply doing that job well, helping those around her do the job well, leaning into the purpose of that whole position, which is hospitality. I mean, what more godly role can there be than to be someone who displays and offers hospitality to the stranger, such as the customer coming in? Again, that person may have goals to rise up the corporate ladder. That may really excite them. But that person may not. This may not be the thing that she was taught in church would be doing good, big things for God. She can develop skills, develop competencies, develop relationships and learn about the world and make money that might help her in pursuing a real passion over on the side, or giving to missions, or taking a mission trip. There's so many ways that our work supports our overall calling and purpose that God has for us.
[0:14:37] JR: I want to be as explicit as we can for our listeners. Would you argue that when you do that job with truth, goodness and beauty today, that current job you're doing becomes the calling, or helps discover the calling, or funding the calling that's outside of the day job? Or is it all the above, depending on the circumstance, Karen?
[0:14:59] KSP: Yeah, that is a really good question, because I do think that not every job, or task, or role or responsibility that we have is our calling, but we will do many jobs and fulfill many responsibilities and tasks on our way to our calling, or to support our calling. Those answers are going to be different for each person, and sometimes we may not even know in the moment. We may discover sometimes that a job we took in school to help us get through school does become our calling. Or we may just be like, “No, this was just money I needed to make while I was in school to help me along the way and I learned things that I can apply.”
I think it's a reality, and I do want to say this, that because we all care about calling and it seems so exotic and romantic and important, and yet, we might not know what our calling is. It's okay not to know. It's okay to understand that we maybe look back in life and see how all the things that God used in our lives led in a way that we can look and say, “Oh, that was my calling all along.” We don't always know in the moment. Sometimes it's just in looking back to see how God has worked in our lives that we understand how all the pieces fit together, how all the strings and threads are crossed over to create a beautiful tapestry.
[0:16:17] JR: I don't think I've said this out loud on this podcast before, so I'm going to give this a shot and see if this lands. You may vehemently disagree with me. I wrote in Evernote, I may use it in a future book at some point. I wrote a couple of years ago. The more I think about this topic, the less I think of calling as a noun, than I do as an adjective to – I think when we talk about this topic, we can send implicitly the message that God has one thing buried in this earth for you to do. He's not going to tell you where it is, right? It's your job to go unearth it and find it. I'm not sure that's true. I think God as a good father has given his children freedom of choice, freedom to explore, within the bounds, within the fence, if you will, of his commands. I don't think he particularly cares if we choose calling a job A, job B, but I think there is a moment, I'm sure you've experienced this, Karen, where you're doing the work a couple years in and you wake up one day, you’re like, “Oh, man. This is the thing God made me to do.”
To me, that's calling of waking up like, “Yeah. No, but based on how God's designed me to be, this is the thing,” because I'm seeing fruit and how it's serving other people with excellence. Am I talking nonsense? Talk me off the ledge here, Karen.
[0:17:39] KSP: No, no. There's so much goodness packed in there, and I want to pick up a few threads of what you said. First, and I say this in the book, we do need to understand that we have multiple callings over life, right? Again, especially from a Western mindset, we often assume that we're talking about our job, or work when we talk about calling. Sometimes we are. I mean, let's be honest about it. But to be a son, or a daughter, or a brother, or sister, or mother, or father, or friend, or neighbor, these are actually callings.
[0:18:12] JR: Yes. God has called us to be good neighbors. Yeah.
[0:18:15] KSP: Right. Right. The roles in our social networks are calling, being a citizen of the country that God sovereignly placed us in is a calling, and that gets fulfilled in different ways. Those are all callings. Some of those callings will last over our whole lives, and then sometimes they will end. If your parent dies, then you are no longer their daughter. That is not a calling that you have, if a child die. There are different things that can happen that end the calling, but we will still move through multiple callings through our lives. That includes in our work.
I absolutely did myself discover very accidentally, providentially at a particular moment in my life that I was created to teach, despite all my earlier life saying, I never wanted to be a teacher. That was exactly how I put this. This is what I was created to do. Now that I went through something traumatic and ugly where I had to walk away from my 25-year-long academic teaching profession. But yeah, I'm still teaching through my writing, through my Substack.
It's not just one calling that looks a certain way, but it is, again, the way that God uses as you described it, the way He made us, the circumstances He puts us in, to help us find the most meaningful work that we can do in the most meaningful roles we can fulfill, even if they aren’t always the ones that we get most excited about, or would have picked on our own, He still is going to use this. That's the most exciting thing. That's what we want to get passionate about is to see how God is using us in a way that we can uniquely be used.
[0:20:01] JR: It's really good. Really good. Hey, Karen, I think I emailed you about this a couple of weeks ago, but I just released this new book called Five Mere Christians, which tells the story of the five men and women I want most on this podcast, but can't, because they're dead. These five men and women who changed the will without a pulpit. One of whom was somebody we both love, Hannah Moore.
I was greatly, I got to say this publicly, greatly indebted to you and your terrific biography on Moore called Fierce Convictions. I read a bunch of Moore bios. That was the best one I read in my research. As you think back at Hannah, about Hannah, how did she think about this topic of calling? How did she discern the work God made her to do?
[0:20:41] KSP: Oh, I love Hannah Moore. Please, everyone, go out and read this book to be –Jordan's book to be introduced to her. Then you can read mine, if you want to know more.
[0:20:48] JR: Yeah. Get the long version if you can hear, and get the get the cliff notes version for me.
[0:20:52] KSP: Hannah Moore is an amazing figure in history and in the church. Her life is interesting for many reasons, but calling is one of them, because here she was, she was born one of several girls who are pretty poor and obscure school master. As a girl, she was not supposed to get educated in the languages and mathematics and sciences as she did, but her poor father, who didn't even necessarily – wasn't an advocate for female education like this, but he's like, “I've got this smart girl.” He taught her all these things. Then she and her young sisters opened a school for girls in the city of Bristol in England.
In some ways, she was gifted to be a student and a scholar, and then she was in circumstances being born to a father who was a teacher, who could help these girls open their own school. She fulfilled that calling as a teacher. Here's where her whole life changed because, sorry, you got me talking about Hannah Moore.
[0:21:52] JR: I love it.
[0:21:54] KSP: Because she got engaged to a wealthy gentleman who left her at the altar, not once, not twice, but three times. Talk about pain, talk about disruption and heartache. But because he did that and it was customary during the day for her to as a abandoned woman to get a financial package as compensation, her family got her money that he really did owe her, just because that's how it worked in those days. That's what allowed her to begin her financial independence to go into the city of London to stake her claim as a writer, to become lauded and loved by the best writers and critics of the day.
Then, when she became an evangelical Christian, to use that entire platform that had been building up for all these years, to help bring about the end of slavery, the social reformation and the education of the poor in the church. She's amazing. That was her calling.
[0:22:56] JR: She's amazing. My favorite detail about this long engagement with William Turner is that after she called it off the last time, after he broke the engagement the third time, for the rest of his life, I think I got this from your biography. For the rest of his life, whether he was alone, or with friends, William Turner always raised his first glass of wine for the day and a toast to Hannah Moore, the one who got away. As one of Hannah's biographers said, “Providence had overruled his wish to be her husband, in order to preserve her for higher things.”
[0:23:32] KSP: Exactly.
[0:23:33] JR: I love it so much. Karen, most of our guests on the show are not pastors, or even Christian authors like yourself, like me. They're mere Christians working as programmers and preschool teachers and poets, like Hannah Moore. I always love to ask our guests this question. How does the gospel most influence how you do what you do vocationally? How do you think Hannah might have answered that question?
[0:23:56] KSP: Oh, it was all for the Lord. I mean, maybe not in those early years. She excited by the fame and the glory, and so forth. Once her heart was strangely warmed, to use John Wesley's words, she also met other believers that the community is an important part of these kinds of stories. I just believe that she risked it all for the Lord. I mean, she was someone who was prone to wanting to be liked by the celebrities. I don't know if there must be a word for that. She was smitten with that kind of thing. She actually had to risk all of that. Risk being cool and being liked by standing up for the gospel and standing up for what was not popular at the time, including the abolition of slavery.
She would be at these fancy parties and dinner parties and talking about these things that she knew would not make her popular, but she was in the service of the Lord and that just changed everything.
[0:24:52] JR: Yeah. It's unbelievable that her story is not more well-known. It is a crazy made for TV story.
[0:25:00] KSP: I know. I tried to pitch it to the few contacts I have and I cannot – I mean, it is a made for TV story.
[0:25:09] JR: Well, we should talk offline, because we've got some traction to that end. We should continue this conversation. All right, I want to turn the question to you though. I’m curious how you would answer that question in your own work today, right? Because, listen, by God's common grace, there's a lot of similarities, I'm sure, between how you and a non-Christian might engage in your craft. What's different, because of your commitment to the ways of Christ?
[0:25:30] KSP: This is not a life I ever pursued, or wanted, or envisioned for myself, especially the quasi-celebrity Christian author part. I didn't seek it. I'm a little uncomfortable with it most of the time. I'm a very private and introverted person, despite what it appears to be. I know that is the Lord's calling on my life. I know it is, because people will ask me, “How did you do this? How did you do that?” My answer is, I didn't really. I have no idea. Thank you. It's just being obedient in going through the doors he opens for me and trying to hold it all loosely, because it's not for me and I just want to be used by the Lord, and I have to trust all of the fruit to his tending and gardening, because I don't know what He's doing with it all.
I trust Him to make the way to do the cultivating and to bring forth the fruit. I just want myself to stay out of the way, but do the best work that I can do, to do the best job that I can do with the limited skills I have. I'm not the best writer. I'm not the best speaker. I'm not the best thinker. Yet, He is asking me to do these things in public. It's all Him.
[0:26:48] JR: I think about this John Piper quote almost every day, “My job is faithfulness, God's job is fruitfulness.” That's it.
[0:26:55] KSP: That's what I was trying to say. Thanks.
[0:26:57] JR: Yeah. Show up and do the work. Show up and do the way. Hey, neither you or I are the best speaker. John Piper's got a speed on that one, right? Listen, show up and do the work and trust the fruit to the Lord, because the results aren't in our hands in the first place.
All right, Karen, four questions we wrap up every episode of this podcast with number one. Look ahead to the new earth. Isaiah 65 says, we’ll long enjoy the work of our hands. Revelation 22 says, that we'll serve God actively and reign with Christ. What job would you love for God to give you on the new earth? Do you want to interview Hannah Moore and her contemporaries? What do you want to be doing?
[0:27:31] KSP: I want to take care of the horses. Can I do that?
[0:27:37] JR: That's an amazing –
[0:27:38] KSP: They will be there. Animals will be there.
[0:27:41] JR: Well, hey, listen, your desires will be perfectly aligned with the Lord's. He'll give you the desires of your heart. Either be horses, or something better. Amen?
[0:27:48] KSP: Amen.
[0:27:49] JR: I love that. If we opened up your Amazon order history, which book could we see you purchasing the most to give away to friends?
[0:27:55] KSP: Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.
[0:27:58] JR: Great answer. Great answer.
[0:28:01] KSP: Yeah. It speaks for itself. If you haven't read it, go read it.
[0:28:04] JR: It's really good. Who would you most want to hear in this podcast, talking about how their faith is shaping the work that they do in the world?
[0:28:10] KSP: Well, this is a little bit cheating, because he's written a lot about it and I've read a lot of what he's written about it, but I'd love to just hear him sit down and talk about it for 40 minutes, and that's Mako Fujimura.
[0:28:19] JR: Oh, Mako's been on. I love Mako.
[0:28:20] KSP: Oh, okay. Well, I guess, I just have to go back and listen.
[0:28:22] JR: Oh, Mako’s great.
[0:28:24] KSP: But, I mean, yeah. He's probably the person I learned the most from in the church today about all these things. They're all the most important things to me.
[0:28:36] JR: What's one thing you've learned from Mako that you hadn't heard before, or hadn't thought about before?
[0:28:39] KSP: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, okay. In culture care, he talks about the people who are called to be the border walkers, or border stalkers, who are called to the margins of society and especially as Christians to be the mediators between the world out there and the church and how they are not – they're not in either world and they send messages back and forth between the world and the church. Yet, they are rejected by both. That helped me understand who I am and who God made me to be and why it's so hard.
[0:29:19] JR: Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. I love Mako's work. His wife is actually one of my favorite episodes of this podcast.
[0:29:25] KSP: I'll go back and listen to that.
[0:29:26] JR: Haejin Shim Fujimura, a phenomenally successful attorney, just fascinating woman. Is really good. All right, Dr. Prior, we've talked about a lot of different themes under this broad umbrella of vocation and calling. What's one thing you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?
[0:29:42] KSP: I want to reiterate, again, that we have multiple callings over the course of our lives. Some of those callings sometimes might be the big dramatic ones that we assume are callings, or think we're looking for. Most often, our callings are very ordinary, everyday things that we do in our real lives and our homes and our families and our neighborhoods and our communities. It's not always about doing big, glamorous things for God. It's sometimes about just simply being a good neighbor, being a good friend. Those are some of the most important callings that we have.
[0:30:22] JR: Amen. Karen, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you do every day, for the glory of God and the good of others, for helping us today replace this worldly view of calling as a means of self-expression with a more Christ-like view of work and calling as a means of self-sacrifice and service. Yes, joy for ourselves. Guys, you got to check out Karen's book, You Have a Calling, as well as Fierce Convictions. Again, it was the primary biography me and my co-author, Kaleigh Cox, were drawing on for Hannah's section of Five Mere Christians. Karen, thank you so much for joining us today.
[0:30:56] KSP: Thank you so much for having me.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:30:59] JR: When Karen talked about wanting to take this book back and rewrite it, it reminded me of this Aaron Sorkin quote that I think about all the time. Sorkin, of course, the creator of the West Wing, The Social Network, probably my favorite writer of all time, Sorkin said, “I've never turned in a script that I didn't want to immediately take back and totally rewrite.” That's how Karen felt about her book, it's how I feel about every single thing I turn in. I don't know, maybe there's a new version, or a revised version of Master of One, or Redeeming Your Time or Called to Create in the future, I don't know.
Guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Do me a favor, if you're loving the mere Christians podcast, let us know by leaving a review of the show wherever you're listening right now. Thank you guys so much for listening. I'll see you next week.
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