There is a sentence that has done a great deal of quiet damage, and almost everybody under fifty has absorbed it without ever being taught it directly.
Your work should be your calling.
Picture the woman who believed it. She is thirty eight. She processes insurance claims. She is good at it, she is fair to the people on the other end of the phone, and she has never once felt anything about it.
Not dislike. She does not hate her job. She feels about her job roughly what she feels about her commute, which is that it exists and it is fine.
And she has spent about fifteen years quietly assuming that this means something is wrong with her.
Because she has heard, at conferences and in sermons and from a great many well meaning people, that God has a calling for her, and that when a person finds it they know, and that work done in your calling does not feel like work.
She has waited fifteen years to feel it.
And in that time she has done two things that cost her a great deal. She has half discounted her own working life, because it is not the real thing yet. And she has carried a low grade sense of being spiritually behind, which has never once lifted, because there is no way to make a feeling arrive by wanting it.
Here is what needs saying plainly, and it is the whole point of this article. The sentence she absorbed is not in the Bible. The word calling is, and it means something almost entirely different, and the difference is the relief.
What Paul actually calls a calling
There is a passage in First Corinthians where Paul uses the word calling four times in about six verses, and what he attaches it to is startling to anybody who has only heard the modern version.
But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk. And so ordain I in all churches. (1 Corinthians 7:17, King James Version)
Read what surrounds that verse and see what he is talking about. Marriage. Being single. Being circumcised or not. Being a slave or free.
Not one of those is an occupation, and not one of them is a passion, and not one of them was chosen.
He is using calling to mean the actual situation a person is standing in when God calls them, and his whole argument is that a person does not have to exchange it for a different one in order to be legitimate.
You are standing in what Scripture means by a calling, and 1 Corinthians 7 applies the word to circumstances rather than to occupations (1 Corinthians 7:17), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary situation into a place a person is actually called to.
And he says it again a few verses later, and the wording is worth the whole article.
Brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God. (1 Corinthians 7:24)
Therein abide with God.
Not until something better arrives. Not while waiting to discover the real thing. Therein, meaning here, in this, with God in it.
You are able to abide with God in the actual thing you do, and 1 Corinthians 7:24 says therein rather than pointing anybody somewhere else (1 Corinthians 7:24), and the Spirit of God is the one who is there in a claims department rather than only in the life she has been waiting for.
The calling and the walking
There is one more use of the word that finishes it, and it is in Ephesians.
I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called. (Ephesians 4:1)
The vocation wherewith ye are called. And then read what the next three verses say it looks like.
Lowliness. Meekness. Longsuffering. Forbearing one another in love. Keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Not one of those is a job. Every single one of them is a way of being with people, and every single one of them is available in a claims department on a Tuesday.
You have a vocation that is described in terms of how you are with people, and Ephesians 4 lists lowliness and patience rather than an occupation (Ephesians 4:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who is named two verses later as the one whose unity is being kept.
Which means she has been in her calling for fifteen years and has been waiting for it to arrive.
You have not been outside your calling waiting for it, and Ephesians 4:1 defines it as a walk rather than as a job somebody finds (Ephesians 4:1), and the Spirit of God is the one who has been in it with her the whole time.
What this is not
Let me be plain, because this could be misused in both directions.
This is not saying nobody has a strong sense of direction about their work. Some people genuinely do and it is real and it is not being taken away from them.
It is also not saying she should never change jobs. She might, for all sorts of good reasons, and nothing here is telling her to stay.
And it is not saying that work does not matter. It matters enormously. What is being taken away is one specific and unbiblical standard: that it is supposed to feel like something, and that not feeling it is a defect.
And plainly: if the flatness has spread past work, if nothing anywhere has any color in it, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is not a calling problem and it is bigger than this article. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Getting help is not a failure of faith.
You are not being told to lower your expectations, and 1 Corinthians 7 dignifies an ordinary situation rather than downgrading anybody's hopes (1 Corinthians 7:17), and the Holy Spirit is the one who can make a thing enough without making it small.
So here is the turn, and it does not require a change of anything.
You are already inside a calling, and 1 Corinthians 7:24 says wherein a person is called, therein abide with God (1 Corinthians 7:24), and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word that has been misused for a generation and puts it back where the letter actually put it.
Now the counterfeit, and in a sincere person it comes dressed as spiritual ambition. It says: if you cannot feel it, you have not found it yet. Look at the shape of that. It names the person rather than a thing, it opens no door, and its only instruction is to keep waiting and keep discounting the years going past. Conviction from the Holy Spirit names one specific thing and always opens a door in the same breath.
You have not been spiritually behind for fifteen years, and 1 Corinthians 7:17 tells a person to walk in the situation they were called in rather than to go looking for a different one (1 Corinthians 7:17), and that work belongs to the Spirit of God, who has been in that claims department for all of them.
Nothing here promises the work starts feeling like something. It probably does not. What is settled is that the word means a situation rather than an occupation, that the walk is described in terms of how a person is with people, and that fifteen years of ordinary work were never a waiting room.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in the kitchen or the car. You are in Christ, and that is what makes the authority to speak over your own work delegated rather than invented. God tells a person to abide with Him in the situation they were called in, so speak to the standard that has made you defective for fifteen years, and then leave the outcome to Him.
- Standard that my work should feel like a calling, you are not from Scripture and you have made me defective for nothing. The Word of God says wherein he is called, therein abide with God.
- Sense of being spiritually behind, you are put out in the name of Jesus. Ephesians 4 describes the vocation as lowliness and meekness and longsuffering, every one of which is available on a Tuesday.
- Father, First Corinthians 7 says as God hath distributed to every man, so let him walk. I say plainly what I do with no apology on the end of it, and I thank You that Your Spirit has been in every one of these fifteen years with me.
1 Corinthians 7:17
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.