What is identity? What’s vocation? Why are they important? When you do figure out a definition, how does it affect your life?
I’m going to spend the rest of the month digging into Identity and Vocation, and what it means for us.
A lot of the ideas for this series come from Walking with the Poor (WWP), The Promise of Desire (PD), and Desiring the Kingdom (DtK). We’re going to look at what it means to love, the idea that men (and women) get their identity from their job, what does a Christian company look like, what does it mean to be a servant with our resources, practices that form us, and more.
My thinking has been stretched the past couple of months and I can’t wait to explore it a little more in-depth. So add me to your reader, and check back every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for posts in this series.
Now. On to identity.
Watch this, and stop at the 1 minute mark.
Identafamy. Identity. What is it?
Here are some other definitions by various authors:
It is who and what you are.
It can be social – a member of a group, a label.
It can be personal – you have distinguishing, unchangeable characteristics.
Who they are, how they relate to others.
National identity.
Expectation about self.
Social – know who you are in a group.
Images of yourself and others.
“One hesitates to try to define the sacred, the ineffable, or the complex.”
Wise words. But he gets at it when he calls it sacred.
All of these definitions attempt to explain what God was doing when he created us, but it seems as if we have as much trouble with the word as Dr. Two-Brains does.
We need to dig at this. Who we are is a fundamentally important fact.
“We must know who we are and the purpose for which we were created.” (WWP)
There are a lot of quotes in today’s post. Consider them as a guest post of sorts, from much greater minds than mine.
“With God’s help we can recompose our own stories so that we discover our true identity and true vocation, namely, being God’s children journeying toward God’s kingdom.” (WWP)
“We are made in the image of a God who is and who is acting. Thus, we must be who we are – bearers of the image of a relational God – and do what we were made by God to do – be fruitful in self-giving relationships…We are not who we truly are unless we are doing both.” (WWP)
So, our working definition of identity for this series is:
relational beings who reflect the image of God.
**********
Identity and vocation are often paired together, and very often conflated. But they are two separate concepts.
The secular definition of vocation tends to be:
Strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.
Main occupation, a person’s employment.
It carries the connotation of a career that someone is drawn to based on their specific skills and talents.
But in the Christian world, the meaning of vocation is ‘a call, or summons’, and it comes from the Latin. We interpret is as meaning a ‘calling’ from God.
But sometimes when talking about Christian vocation, what we really mean is, ‘faith-related career opportunities; vocation in ministry’, which is not true vocation.
“Knowing who we truly are and pursuing our true vocation is the key to more life, not just more things or even more knowledge.” (WWP)
Vocation is not who we are. It’s how we are. Are we lovers? Are we kingdom people?
“With God’s help we can recompose our own stories so that we discover our true identity and true vocation, namely, being God’s children journeying toward God’s kingdom.” (WWP)
It’s important that, with so much confusion about what the terms might mean, that we begin with the same understanding as we move forward with this series.
“Christian worship as an affective school, a pedagogy of desire in which we learn not how to be spiritual or religious, but how to be human, how to take up the vocation given to us at creation.” (DtK)
“Over and over again we find in Orthodox sources a call to holiness—this is the ultimate vocation of every human being.”
“Christians believe that in coming to know Christ better we come to know who we are and what we are called to do with our life…….Our working theological definition is, then, this: vocation is our unique and ongoing response to Christ’s call to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and the neighbor as ourselves.“
“Vocation is about who we are, not what we are, and it is now — our unique and ongoing response to love God and the neighbor today.”
Our definition of vocation going forward with this series is:
working towards God’s kingdom, loving him and everyone else.
On Wednesday, we’ll take a look at what it means to love others. What do you think? What does identity and vocation mean to you? Do you like these definitions?“To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are.” (DtK)
My “textbook” on vocation tends to be “The Call”, by Os Guinness: I’ve read it two or three times, and have gone back to it as a resource multiple times as well. I love this:
“After all, work, for most of us, determines a great part of our opportunity for significance and the amount of good we are able to produce in a lifetime. Besides, work takes up so many of our waking hours that our jobs come to define us and give us our identities. We become what we do. ***Calling reverses such thinking.*** A sense of calling should precede a choice of job and career, and the main way to discover calling is along the line of what we are each created and gifted to be. Instead of, ‘You are what you do,’ calling says: ‘Do what you are.'” (page 45).
I really could just quote this whole book!
Oh, I love that! That will have to go next on my library list. I tend to request a bunch of books at one time, because I get all excited when I’m looking them up, and I think, oh I can easily do that in 3 weeks – and then get overwhelmed and not finish them all. Dumb. So I have 5 books coming, plus 4 that I bought from amazon coming this week….oopsies. So that will be after those, lol. It was so hard to not just quote the entire Walking with the Poor book in this, lol. I actually do have 2 posts of just quotes from these three books, b/c I loved them so much. And it’s handy to use as a reference instead of combing through all of my notes.
Do you use Evernote? I only recently started using it but it would be a good place to store all of those quotes you want to save.
And yeah, I know about piling up on the books to read…I think I have 12 in my to-read pile.
I have it, and kind of use it, but I think I’m not using it right. I just use it to type up ideas. My problem is I handwrite all my notes/quotes. It’s probably really inefficient.
I’m still figuring it out a bit, but I have a stack called “Writing” and then notebooks in that stack for various things: specific projects, draft posts, even one called “Writing Fragments” for when I just have a random thought. It’s hard to get away from handwritten notes, though, but I ended up with so many scraps of paper that it was frustrating. So if I am out somewhere and I write something down, I stick it in Evernote when I get home.
yeah, I have 3 notebooks write now that I’m flipping back and forth between. It’s really obnoxious. I’ll have to look at that more in-depth. I just have it on my phone and use that when I don’t have a notebook. I’m hoping to finally get a laptop or notebook or something this spring, which will hopefully make all of this easier. Right now I only have a pc, so it’s hard to get to it all the time.
Ohhh…yeah, that should make it somewhat easier. I don’t use the phone app too much. On my computer, though, I love that I can clip web pages to it. So much better than bookmarking sites! My laptop needs to be replaced too, for various reasons.
Such helpful thoughts! Questions of vocation and identity are constantly on my mind as a grad student.
xo
Kim
Caris, I have a confession: I first opened your post a few days ago (was it only yesterday?), skimmed it, saw it was long and would require thought so I closed it, figuring I’d skip this one. BUT the topic intrigued me so I came back. I’m so glad I did. I look forward to this series a lot!
hahaha!!! Well this one was actually kind of boring to write b/c it was so many quotes and not much pondering. Even my husband had trouble getting through it, lol. So I understand! Hopefully the rest of them will be easier to read!
This is such a big topic. I’m only skimming the surface and I’ve already discovered several other books on the topic I want to read eventually.
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