 Somewhere along the way, “calling” started to mean the work you would gladly do even if nobody paid you for it: your passion, your purpose, the thing you were supposedly made for. That sounds beautiful, of course. But it can also put a heavy burden on an ordinary Tuesday. It sets an impossibly high bar for most real jobs, and it is not what Luther meant by the word in the first place.
So if your job does not feel like a calling in that modern sense — if it is mostly how you pay the bills, not something you would frame on the wall — it may be worth taking a breath before deciding something has gone wrong. The older meaning of the word may fit your actual life better than the modern one does. The word is Beruf, and it was not mainly about fulfillment Before the Reformation, vocation usually meant one thing: a call to religious life. Monks, nuns, and priests had vocations. Most everyone else simply had work to do — necessary work, sometimes honorable work, but not work people tended to describe as spiritually significant. Luther challenged that hierarchy on purpose. His German word, Beruf, applied to everyone — the farmer, the magistrate, the mother, the cobbler, the milkmaid at her pail — with no lower tier. Underneath that shift was the priesthood of all believers: every baptized Christian stands before God on the same footing. That means every station in life can become a place to serve God, not only the obviously religious ones. You may be wearing a mask, and that is a compliment Luther had a strange but vivid image for this: larvae Dei, the masks of God. God feeds the world, Luther said, but usually not by doing it directly. He does it through the farmer growing the grain, the baker making the bread, and the person at the register handing it to you at the end of a long day. Ordinary work is one of the ways God does ordinary things in the world. The person doing the work is, in a sense, wearing God’s mask for that particular task. That may sound like a strange thing to say about a shift at a call center, a warehouse, or any job that mostly leaves you tired. But if you take it seriously, it becomes a deeply dignifying claim about work the culture rarely treats as dignified. The job does not have to feel personally meaningful every hour for it to be doing something real. Its meaning comes from the neighbor it serves, not from how inspired you feel while doing it. The neighbor is the point, even when the paycheck matters Here is the practical shift: if you are waiting to feel called before your job counts as a calling, the focus has quietly moved toward your own fulfillment. Luther’s version points in the other direction. The calling is recognized by looking at who is being served: the coworker who needed the shift covered, the customer who needed the problem solved, the family the paycheck supports. That is where the calling shows up — not in your enthusiasm level on a Thursday afternoon. This is not a way of talking yourself into liking a bad job. Bad jobs are still bad. Underpaid, mistreated, precarious work does not become fine because you have found a theological frame for it. But it does mean the dignity of the work is not dependent on the work also being your passion. You do not have to love it for it to count. Two kinds of calling, not one It helps to separate two things our language tends to collapse into one word. There is the general call — the call to faith itself, the same for every Christian and not tied to any job. And there is the specific call — your actual station in life right now: this job, this family, this set of responsibilities, whatever it currently is. The specific call can change. It can eveninclude a job you are actively trying to leave. It does not need to become your permanent identity in order to be the place where you are currently living out the general call. That distinction does a lot of quiet work. It means you can be faithfully called to a job you are also trying to get out of. Those two things are not necessarily in conflict. The calling is not an endorsement of the job’s rightness for your whole life. It is a claim about what is actually happening while you are there. If you are between callings right now If you are unemployed, underemployed, or between jobs entirely, this framework still holds, even though it can be harder to see from there. The searching itself — the applications, the waiting, the interviews that go nowhere — is not a gap in your vocation. It is what your specific calling looks like at the moment, however unwelcome that may be. Dignity in this framework was never tied to having landed the job. It was tied to something underneath employment status entirely, which means it does not switch off during the gap. That is not comfort dressed up as theology. It is simply this: whatever you are doing right now to get through this stretch is not outside the reach of what Luther was describing. It is inside it. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack. ©2026 Steve Stutz. All rights reserved. Brief quotes welcome with attribution; full reprints require permission. Details at https://www.stevestutz.com (bottom of page)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
