Find Your Vocation Through Love and Pain

In a helpful interview with World Magazine, Andy Crouch articulates a clear path for discerning your vocation. Not only should you search for what you love to do (and what you're good at doing), but find how that talent intersects with with where the world is in pain.

How should others decide how to invest their time? The 10,000 hours is a great index, because you will not make it to mastery unless you love something. So, the first question: What do you love enough to make it to those 10,000 hours? For me, writing and music are two things. For other people it's chemistry or philosophy...Should Christians think differently about vocation than non-Christians? For Christians it can't just be a self-discovery process of "What are my deepest desires and how do I fulfill those?" Not instead of that, but in addition to that, we should ask, "Does this vocation take me to a place where the world is in pain?" Christian vocation takes us to a place where our work intersects with the brokenness of the world. That contrasts with the Kantian idea that your vocation is what you least like to do because God secretly hates you and is going to send you to do the thing you most dislike. I don't think that's right. God does call us to place our delights in the context of the cross and to delight in living where the world hurts.

Read the whole thing.