How to Find Your Calling

When I was 18, I carried a vivid picture of what my life would be like when I was 28. That particular image took form during my first semester of college when my English professor assigned an essay describing what we envisioned our lives would be like 10 years from that point in time. I described an evening of horseback riding into the sunset (yes, it’s true) with my future husband (whoever he was—I couldn’t see his face in this picture—we were facing the sunset, after all) with our two Labrador retrievers ambling alongside. I imagined that my husband and I had been married for five years, that I was established in my career as a social worker (the major I started with in college), and that on that ride we discussed starting a family.

I had it so clearly mapped out. What’s interesting is how much my life turned out as I described it in the essay—and how much it didn’t.

I met the man who would become my husband just weeks after writing the essay. We married a year later. (I was 19, not 23.) Three semesters later, I changed my major from social work to English. (I would have made a terrible social worker.) I went on to get a PhD in English. We were never able to have children. We did have horses and have owned numerous dogs throughout our decades of marriage. (Never a Labrador retriever, though. I have no idea why I thought I would like that breed! No offense to Lab lovers, but they are lumbering and goofy.)

Entering college as a social work major, I took English as a requirement, although it was certainly one I looked forward to. I had loved English throughout all my elementary and high school years. During my second semester in college, my American literature professor encouraged me to switch my major to English. “No,” I told him. “English is something I enjoy but not something I take seriously.” (Ouch.) Just one semester later, I found myself back in that professor’s office. He was the department chair and had to sign the form allowing me to declare my major in English. He hadn’t forgotten our earlier conversation, and he was amused to let me know he hadn’t. I didn’t know it then, but I was on my way to discovering my calling. But it would take a while.

My friend Chris Davis is a pastor. He is one of the most pastoral people I know. People in his home church told him when he was in high school that he was called to ministry. In college he spent his spare time ministering by mentoring younger students, facilitating Bible studies, and preaching in churches. But Chris didn’t think he was called to ministry because, in his mind, he had a picture of what a calling looked like: direct from God, accompanied by a feeling inside, followed by a walk up the church aisle to the altar to accept. That didn’t happen, so he planned to pursue advanced studies in math after college and become a professor, assuming he would remain involved in church life as he had always done—as a layperson. But then someone who observed how he spent his time asked him if he’d ever considered that he was called to be a pastor since that was what he was already doing. He was taken aback at first. But then he came to understand that this was his call. The call came from God through a wise person in his life. And he answered that call.

You may be able to look back on your life someday (or even now) and see that something you have been doing all along has been, all that time, a calling—even before you recognized it as one.

Randall Wallace, the screenwriter and film director who is most famous for writing the screenplay for Braveheart, had a similar experience but in reverse. Randall grew up in the same Baptist church in central Virginia that my husband and I later attended. As a young man, Randall just sort of assumed that his strong faith and desire to serve the church meant he should be a pastor, so after majoring in religion in college, he headed to divinity school. While in seminary, Randall relates, “I was sitting down with my pastor and he said, ‘Do you feel the call to be a pastor?’ I said, ‘Honestly, I don’t, but I know it’s the greatest call anyone can have.’ And he said, ‘You’re wrong. The greatest call anyone can ever have is the one God has for you.’ It’s one of the greatest things anyone ever told me.” He left seminary after one year of study and pursued his calling to write great stories. The rest, as they say, is history. 

When millennial entrepreneur Kate Kennedy fell into evangelical church life as a young person, she heard people for the first time speak of being called by God to do certain things. He calls you? She wondered. She wanted God to call her, too, in the way she thought people meant. But he didn’t. God doesn’t just call us on the phone and give us the time, date, and place where we should show up, much as that would make things easier.

So what do we mean when we talk about being called?

Because I’m a word person, I like to start with definitions. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word from which we also get the word “call,” along with the words “vocal” and “vocalization.” A call, most literally, is an audible sound, cry, or summons. In this literal sense, a call is a summons of someone by someone else. A call requires both a caller and the called.

A calling from God isn’t an audible vocalization such as that given by a military commander or an order from a judge given in court. Rather, God uses the things he has made—other people, our circumstances, our gifts, and even our passions—to sound that call. It is not our job to be called. It is our job to answer the call. The Bible is replete with stories of people being called. Indeed, within the biblical context and within our own lives, calling is “a metaphor for the life of faith itself.” But hearing and discerning this call so that we can answer it isn’t always easy. While passion burns inside us, a call comes from outside.

Remember that famous line from the classic horror movie When a Stranger Calls? “The call is coming from inside the house.” If we were our own callers, it would be kind of a horror-movie situation. But understanding that a calling takes place outside ourselves helps us live in the truth that the pressure to be called is not our own.

Passion is inside; a calling comes from outside.

They don’t always entirely coincide. But sometimes they do. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre marvelously depicts this distinction. From early in life, Jane’s character is defined by a strong sense of justice, a genuine faith, and a fierce desire to love and to be loved. Each of these driving passions meets obstruction after obstruction as Jane seeks to find her way in a lonely and hostile world, to find a place where she belongs. Tempted many times to accept a place or role that is not right for her, Jane finally hears an audible call, a cry from the man she loves from miles and miles away, summoning her back to him in circumstances that now make it right for them to be together. Within the world of the story, it would be impossible for such a call to be carried so far and to be heard by Jane where she is. We can take it only as a supernatural call. But it hardly matters. After many false starts over the course of a difficult and lonely life, Jane’s inner passion and her external call finally coincide. Jane Eyre is often seen as a kind of modern allegory, a Pilgrim’s Progress for our own age. In particular, its depiction of the importance of and the distinction between passion and calling offers a striking metaphor for the modern-day search for and fulfillment of calling.

I’ve seen a different example of passion and calling completely overlapping in the life of my mother. Over many, many decades, my parents have lived in many places and belonged to churches in each one of them. In each of these churches, my mother has had a role in teaching Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, or the children’s choir. Even before that, while attending school as a girl in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Maine, she was assigned by her teacher to help instruct the younger students. My mother never went to college to become a teacher, never had a career or a paying job in teaching. Yet she taught for almost her entire life.

The interesting thing, however, is that she realized only a few years ago that she was a teacher, that she had been one all this time, and that being one was her vocation. She had simply done it without that awareness. Even as she approached her nineties and became too frail to attend church in person, she would sit at home making lessons and craft projects to mail out to children in the family and in a ministry halfway across the globe. She simply could not not teach the Bible to children. It was her calling.

You, too, may be able to look back on your life someday (or even now) and see that something you have been doing all along has been, all that time, a calling—even before you recognized it as one.

Editor’s Note: This essay is excerpted with permission from the new book You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful by Karen Swallow Prior (August 2025, Brazos Press).