Living your Heart’s Desire: God’s Call and your Vocation
Chapter 1: “I’m No Good at Being Noble”: Christian Vocation in a Cynical World
2. “Christian vocation,” as I understand it to be is God’s calling to us of something higher
then us. It is something we are called to do, not necessary a job or career, but something
we can do to help society and further us in life. I do not think “Christian vocation” is
related completely to a job or career. I think our “Christian vocation” puts us into our job
or career eventually, or put us into the track of vocation, but in a Christian prospective
would be our calling to something bigger or higher that God would like us to reach. The
changes in my life that I would make if I understood my vocation as a call to Someone
rather than a call to a particular job or place, I would change my attitude to be more
thankful for the things I have, not that I’m not thankful for what I have, but I could use
more thankfulness towards everything, instead of a few things, I would be thankful for
things, such as, being able to attend college and being a business major, that several years
ago a woman could not be.
4. Suffering, in our own experience, is a tough decision and thing to go through. When I
suffer, I try to think positively and what will be the best to come out of the given
situation. An experience I feel like I encounter often or more than I would like to is
working in groups. I do not see it as suffering, unless my other group members do not do
the work that assigned to us. For instance, in my accounting class, I have this one group
member that never responds to our emails, group chats, or even shows up for class. It is
like she does not care about the group projects we do in class, that not only affects her
grade, but also my grade and my fellow group members. This kind of suffering is an
everyday thing, when I have to worry about projects or the class I am in. I am aware that
this causes me to suffer, as I am sure, it causes my other group members to because we
have to worry about her side of the work, if we want a good grade for everything as a
whole. I deal with this suffering by just dealing with it and talking to the professor about
what I think, but the group member acts as if she does not care. This leads me to feel
anxiety for having to do just more than my part of the group project and it also leads me
to feel anger when she does not participate with our group meetings and planning the
projects.
5. When I think about the reality of suffering, I do not see it as being taken care of by
professionals who deal with “sort of think,” but I do see it as a more personally and
intimately engaged with the broken and messy parts of life. I see it this way because there
are people who can help another person get through suffering, but it is a part of life, just
like everything else. I would not want to put all of my suffering on to someone else; I
think it is a part of life, which I or someone else just has to deal with. Especially, since, I
am not one of the helping professions, (doctor, nurse, clergy, therapist, etc.), I consider
suffering as something that everyone goes through one or more times in their life. We
cannot all reach God’s exact calling for us that is to be part of our everyday vocation.
With our choices comes suffering, if we cannot reach our exact calling. God does not
want us to suffer, but it comes from us when we do not reach what we want in our lives.
Chapter 2: The Gospel and Work
1. My first inclination to seeing Christianity as all about “being good” or as having
nothing to do with being good, is that Christianity has nothing to do with being good.
Life has many different ways of being with us. Being good, in my terms, would basically
be trying to be perfect, a person can try but hardly ever succeed. There are too many
temptations in the world, for us to be “perfect” or good. I think inclination about
Christianity has nothing to do with being good. These are the two misunderstandings of
Christianity, it is all about being good and it has nothing to do with being good. Our
temptations make us work towards a goal or something we want, our work is our energy
expanding and our vocation is spending our energy as well as can, whether it be on work
or just a common goal, according to Meilaender’s theory. To tell someone new to
