IF YOU ARE COMING TO NEW YORK YOU HAVE TO KNOW TWO THINGS

If you are coming to New York, you have to know two things.

One, you will never be bigger than New York. You are not going to be able to come and build some great thing that is bigger than this city. This city will always be bigger than you. You will need gospel humility.

Two, you have to have a sense that you are bringing something unique to the kingdom ecosystem of New York. You have to feel that you have something to offer that doesn’t exist and is needed, otherwise join something already doing well or don’t come. It will be too hard without a clear sense of this. You will need gospel confidence.

Tim Keller
Counsel to Jon Tyson

VOCATION

It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.  

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.  

By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either. 

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. 

Frederick Buechner

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking

THE CALLING VOICE

The voice we should listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice that we might think we should listen to least, and that's the voice of our own gladness.

What can we do that makes us the gladdest, what can we do that leaves us with the strongest sense of sailing true north and of peace, which is much of what gladness is?

Is it making things with our hands out of wood or stone or paint or canvas? Or is it making something we hope like truth out of words? Or is it making people laugh or weep in a way that cleanses their spirit?

I believe that if it is a thing that makes us truly glad, then it is a good thing and it is our thing and it is the calling voice that we were made to answer with our lives.

Frederick Buechner