I leaned heavily on the late Frederick Buechner when it came to responding to students who were trying to discern a vocational direction. Buechner wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (from Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC) That is a truly brilliant and wise word to those searching. "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.”
I set out to discover my vocation sometime in the late 60’s and early 70’s and from the place I am now it seems like it was a whole lot easier then to the discern a calling than it is today. There are so many voices calling out to the searcher, so many distractions, so much money, so many clouds that make it difficult to find a north star.
So where might one begin. Back to Buechner from his Now and Then, “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself if grace.”