WHEN YOU'RE ASKED TO DO CAREER COUNSELING

Alan surprised me one Sunday morning by popping into our worship service unannounced; he had driven close to two hours to attend.

As one of the youngest members of the youth group in our previous church, it seemed like Alan had grown up with our family, so after the service I asked him to come home for lunch.

“That’d be great,” he said. “But could you take a quick ride with me first?” We walked out to the parking lot, got into his sleek sports car, and took off.

“I’ve been going through a confusing time lately,” he admitted. “I’m doing well in the company where I work. If I stay a few more years, I could work my way into an executive position. I’ve met a wonderful girl. Everything is going great.”

He paused and gripped the wheel tighter. “But, I feel as though I’d like to go a different direction. I’ve been interested in counseling and psychology ever since you were at our church. And, well, I think I’d like to become a psychologist. When I talk about it with my fianc, I think I’ve settled the issue, and then I change my mind. We discuss it again, I decide to stay where I am, and then I have second thoughts.”

Alan looked down the stretch of Texas highway and swallowed. “My fianc became frustrated with me the other day and asked why I didn’t talk to someone whose view I respect. She asked me who that might be, and I told her it would be you. So she said, ‘Next Sunday you’re going to go see him.’ And here I am. Now, what do you think I should do?”

Ministers are often on the front line of vocational counseling. Young people confront us, searching for ways to invest their lives. Unhappy adults come with questions about career changes. Pink-slip victims often have no idea where to start over.

I wasn’t trained in vocational guidance. Still, I had to figure out how to help people with one of the most important decisions of their lives not merely so they could pay their bills, but so they could find God’s will and be fruitful.

After working with a number of people in vocational counseling, I’ve found that having people examine four criteria helps them find their call in life.

Concentrate on passion more than perks

One evening my wife and I ate dinner with a couple from Corpus Christi, Texas. The husband buys leases for oil companies. He works with strange computer diagrams of geological surveys, calculating where petroleum might lurk beneath the ground.

“I love what I do,” he said. “I’ll be happy if that’s all I do the rest of my life.” When he analyzes data, he loses touch with time and space, working for hours yet feeling that only minutes have passed. His eyes lit up as he spoke about his work.

When he asked what I did, he could see I loved my work just as much. But if someone told us that starting tomorrow we would have to trade places, we would both go crazy! Time would crawl. We’d be stuck on treadmills of drudgery.

God created us with a variety of interests. One person’s passion is another person’s prison. No matter how many perks come with a job, if a person does not enjoy it, he or she will find it hard to continue for the long haul. While every job has its tedious or disappointing moments, when we’re in the right vocation, the passion outweighs the pain.

This insight helped me understand June as she struggled to make a critical career decision. Though she had returned to the university to get an M.B.A., and though she had a high-paying corporate position, something was telling her she wasn’t heading the right direction. But after three years of stiff academic work to get her M.B.A., she decided she couldn’t change course.

I left that parish and didn’t hear from June for a few years. Then I found out she was going to seminary. I was puzzled. Was she clutching at straws? A visit with June and one of her seminary administrators dispelled my concerns.

“June has literally turned the department around,” he told me. “Her business know-how combined with pastoral sensitivity has done it.” June followed her heart and her head to a vocation in which she found great joy. Perks are no substitute for passion.

Look for value in the career

If we know we make a difference and that others need us, our career choice has greater value.

If, on the other hand, we feel what we do is unimportant, that we can be easily dispensed with, then no matter how much we are paid or how much we like what we do, we will find little joy in our vocation. People’s level of commitment to a task is directly related to their perception of how much they are needed.

A couple of years ago a young man, a skilled technician, raised this issue in a counseling session.

“I am making good money,” he said. “I have job security, but I guess I’m just burned out. I hate getting up in the morning to go to my job. It isn’t the amount of work I’m doing. It’s just that, well, my work doesn’t seem to be making any real contribution to people’s lives. I go through the motions, punch the clock, and collect my pay.”

“What would you like to do if you could do anything you wanted?” I asked.

I was surprised at his answer: “I’d like to be a social worker,” he said, “able to help people. I want to make a contribution.”

He thought it was crazy at his age (around 30) to go to college. The difficulties seemed insurmountable. Though he had a high school diploma and a little technical training, he had never made terrific grades.

To sharpen his focus, I asked, “How do you think you might feel twenty years from now, if you looked back and knew this was the moment you decided not to take a shot at this new vocation?”

I could see the answer in his face before he responded. “I’d feel awful.”

That did it. He used his technical skills to finance education for a new vocation.

Count the cost to become competent

Interest, even passion for a vocation, isn’t enough to make it happen. Louis Pasteur once said, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared minds.” The same is true in our vocational choices: opportunity favors prepared people. Competence is essential, and its prerequisite is the willingness and discipline to prepare.

Mary, a high school girl in my parish some years ago, told me about her dream of becoming a fashion model. We talked about how difficult it would be for her to get even a shot at success. But she was firm in her decision. The glamour, lights, and excitement lured her away from her small community.

A few years later she was back in town-back to stay, she said. The pressure was too much; the apprenticeship too long. Modeling no longer seemed worthwhile. She decided she would try something else.

Those who submit to the tough process of discipleship will find themselves on the road to vocational competence. The dictionary defines vocation not only as a “divine call to . . . a career or occupation” but also as a “sense of fitness for a career or occupation.” Unless one becomes a disciple of a profession, that vocation will go unrealized.

Let the church confirm the call

When we find our calling, our lives are channeled into a vocation consistent with who we are. We realize, I was made for this. But our inner awareness of a vocation’s correctness can be confirmed by others.

God’s call has both a personal and a corporate dimension. Vocation is not something ethereal we find in the throes of mystical rapture. Rather, vocation grows out of the awareness that God uses us, with our specific interests and skills, to meet concrete needs. This personal awareness of “calling” is confirmed in the body of Christ. In fact, it is often the body of Christ that awakens us to our proper vocation.

Janice, an outgoing mother of two and a committed member of the church, came to my office one afternoon. She was also going through a divorce and wondering where to go and what to do.

“I feel so desperate,” she said. “It’s pretty scary at my age to enter the job market for the first time.”

“What makes you afraid?” I asked. She mentioned her sense of incompetence and powerlessness because of inexperience. Gradually we moved on to specific vocational questions: What are your interests? What skills have you developed as a mother, a wife, a committee chairperson in the church and organizer of community activities?

My questions startled her. She had not considered that everyday activities required marketable skills. We looked at the findings from the vocational guidance tests I had asked her to take. A picture of her interests and skills began to emerge, but the picture was still quite dim.

Finally she asked, “How will I know I am in the right vocation? I pray about it, but I get nowhere!” The room seemed to fill with her fears.

“What do you hope to get when you pray?”

“An answer. I want to know what to do. All I feel is scared,” she said. “How can I test my vocational ideas,” she continued, “to see if they make sense, to see if I am on the right track? I don’t hear an answer to my prayer. I don’t know any more about my vocational choice now than I did when I started.”

“Ah,” I said. “Don’t you? You have told me what your interests are, what you are good at, and what you enjoy. You’ve told me those things that bore you and those things you love, even when they become difficult. You’ve learned that other people in the church have been blessed by things you have done here, and you didn’t even think they were things you did well. I would say the heavens have been far from silent. It is a matter of listening to a variety of witnesses.

“I know many people doing a ministry they never imagined themselves doing, because the people of God kept telling them they were called to do it.”

Janice began to see, for herself, the vital connections between calling and vocational choice. With that affirmation she was able to overcome her anxieties and make some crucial decisions.

She found her niche in secretarial work and discovered she could type to the glory of God. Her fears never materialized. She had time for her children, joined a support group, and continued her work in her church.

God calls us to invest our lives, and his call reaches us where we are. As pastors and counselors, we’re privileged to help others hear that call and find their way through the maze of vocational decisions.

-Michael Jinkins

First Presbyterian Church

Brenham, Texas