(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Vocation vs. Vacation, originally shared on August 6, 2020. It was the thirty-eighth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that our son, who works from his home, told us someone had posted online a meme that said, “Maybe instead of saying we work from home, we should say we live at work”. Because, that’s the way it feels sometime.
Life during this pandemic can be
disorienting at times, including the way we think of our work.
Microsoft commissioned a study of how people
are doing working from home and one of the conclusions was shocking! Sounds
like click-bait doesn’t it? Well, it was surprising.
The study found that most people who work at
home put in more hours than they did when they worked at an old-normal
office.
The people who did the study reflected that
it was probably because people were temporarily distracted to do personal
chores, get interrupted more often, take time to homeschool their children,
etc., and then had to finish their work. But, still…. It’s interesting, isn’t
it, and is probably another reason people are so exhausted staying at home.
Of course, people who are working from home
also say they are happy to have a job. Millions of people do not, and they have
the burden of want and the need to look for a job.
So, I think that everyone would say they
need a vacation.
But how do you take a vacation during a
pandemic? RV sales are booming. Cruise ships are taking the first tentative
trips, and being shut down. There are few options and limited finances, so
fewer people are taking vacations.
All of us, however, still have our
vocations. What’s the difference between a vacation and a vocation? One letter
(cue canned laughter).
The word “vocation” does not mean our job.
The work “vocation” comes from the Latin work “vocare”, to call. It is the
basis for the English word “vocal”. It means “calling”.
Each of us has a calling. In many Christian
churches it is said that a candidate for the ministry, being a pastor, needed
to have a calling to the ministry. That wasn’t said much about people who weren’t
clergy. We had “vocational training” and “vocational schools”, but that was
simply understood to be about a job.
It missed an important point. Martin Luther,
the 16th century reformer and first Protestant, said that the
calling to be a shoemaker and the calling to be a pastor are no different, and
one is not better or holier than the other.
Christians receive God’s calling to be
teachers, or doctors, or custodians, or electricians. One of our life’s chief’s
tasks it to determine what it is God is calling us to do with our lives, what vocation
is, and then to do that job as a calling from God.
When I was in seminary Bill Diehl, who was a
vice-president of Bethlehem Steel, came to speak about his book about the
nature of a Christian calling.
I remember that he asked us to think about
the most important characteristic of a Christian in the workplace. Many said it
was integrity, or a Christian witness, or ethical behavior, like in the story
about a man who was being interviewed for a senior position at IBM by the
company’s founder, Thomas Watson. At one point, during a break, the president’s
phone rang and he asked the candidate to answer it. The man did and then put
his hand over the mouthpiece and said that it was from Mr. so-and-so. Thomas
Watson, the president, said, “Tell him I’m not here.” The candidate took his
hand off the mouthpiece, handed it to the president, and said, “You tell him.”
The president took the call, and when he finished, he was livid. The candidate
looked at him and said, “If I can lie for you, I can lie to you. And, I never
will.” He got the job and had a long and productive career with IBM. I think
most of us would say that that is a good example of Christian behavior in the
workplace.
But, that’s not what Mr. Diehl said was the most
important quality of a Christian. He said the most important quality of a
Christian in the workplace was competence. Competence, because that quality is
an expression of the knowledge that we don’t just have a job, we have a vocation,
that is, honoring our calling to a certain thing by doing it well.
*Romans
12:4-8
Martin Luther said, “The Christian shoemaker does his duty
not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because
God is interested in good craftsmanship.”
It is our calling that gives our work dignity.
So what about a vacation. I once heard a Luther scholar say that Luther
would not be a great choice to look to when speaking about self-care. He once
said, “The pitcher goes to the well until it breaks.”
He lived in a time when retirement, even weekends and vacations were
unheard of, particularly for the non-rich, which was almost everybody.
Even before the pandemic, Americans where notorious in the world for not
taking vacation time. August is vacation month in most of Europe and some of
the rest of the world. Almost everything, except a few places frequented by
tourists, shuts down.
We prepared for the opposite when I was in seminary. I took a course on
future study in which one theme was that homo sapiens (humanity the wise) would be
replaced by homo ludens (humanity the playful). We were told that one of our
biggest challenges as pastors would be to help people find meaning in their
lives when they had nothing that needed to be done by them.
But, we’re not there yet.
We are at a place where few of us can or will take a vacation this year.
But we all have a vocation, a calling from God, for our work within a
broader calling as disciples of Christ.
*Ephesians 4:1-6
Vacations come and go, but our vocation is
forever and, pandemic or not, our vocation gives our lives shape, meaning, and
purpose. It is a gift from God.
God will find a way for us to put our gifts
to work for God’s glory. What opportunities do you have to exercise your
calling during this pandemic?
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