Karen Swallow Prior, Author of You Have a Calling

My very talented friend Karen Swallow Prior is the author of several books, including The Evangelical Imagination, which I reviewed here last year. This August, she released her latest, You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good & Beautiful, a profound and clarifying meditation on a subject that for many of us is sometimes clouded with uncertainty.

Karen is also a professor who taught for many years in the classroom and now teaches via her Substack, The Priory. In our interview, she reflected on how the insights gleaned from her change in career helped influence her new book.

Q: As you explain in the book, you yourself are an example of someone who pursued a calling (teaching) in one setting for many years, and then, due to the actions of others, had to start practicing it in a different setting. I went through something similar myself. Is there any practical advice you would give to someone going through the same thing and trying to figure out what to do?

A: One of the significant points I make in the book is that we have multiple callings over the course of our lives. They will shift, and sometimes they will even end. Knowing that, I think, can help us face an abrupt and unwanted end (or seeming end) to a calling. It’s not that the pain of loss is erased, but it can be accompanied by an anticipation to see how a new calling (or a transformation of the existing calling) will take form. Being more open-handed about our callings helps us to not get locked in to the constraints of our own boxed-in thinking or the constraints imposed on us by other people or changing situations.

In my own case, my calling to teach did not end when I left my full-time academic position; my calling to teach occurs now in different settings, formats, and schedules. Seeing it that way has helped me to remain true to my calling despite wrong done to me that at first felt devastating. I had to give myself time to adjust, however. It took wisdom not to jump right into the first thing that seemed like the nearest replacement for what I had lost. So be patient, seek wisdom, and be open-handed and curious.

Q: On the flip side of that coin, you write that “God often uses others to discern his calling on our life.” So our calling is inevitably not going to be individualistic, but rather tied to other people. How can we figure out which people to trust and depend on in the area of calling?

A: There is no doubt we will make mistakes along the way in placing trust in the wrong people or even too much trust in the right people. But the Bible says there is wisdom in many counselors. I think we should seek that wisdom, but always weigh it against other sources of counsel, including our own gut instinct.

In the area of calling specifically, we really do need to listen to others because pursuing a calling depends on so many things beyond our control: the marketplace, for example, the responsibilities we have in our other callings (such as within our family), and the mere limitations of our own time and talents. Calling has to take place in the given realities of the world in which we find ourselves, and there is much about that we can’t change.

So, in some ways, we have to trust other people, for their insights and knowledge at least. I have trusted the wrong people more times than I would like to admit. I suppose that is inevitable. But making those mistakes has taught me to trust myself more, and that’s really a gift. It helps to know, as I say in the book, that in God’s economy, nothing is wasted. He will use it all and redeem it all. We are called, ultimately, to trust him.

Q: I love that you quote Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays,” which portrays a father carrying out “love’s austere and lonely offices” by getting up early to light the fire and polish his son’s boots. It always makes me think of my grandfather, back in the days when my mom would hear him getting up early to go to his factory job to provide for his family. Can you say more about what that poem tells us about calling, and also about role models? How does the “thankless” kind of work described here broaden our understanding of these things?

A: I love that poem so much. When I received permission from the copyright holder to use it in the book, I nearly screamed! The poem reflects a major understanding about calling that I’m trying to convey in the book: we are all called (to varying degrees) to the ordinary things in our lives, and for most of us, these ordinary callings will be the most substantial, consistent, and meaningful callings we have. We live in a culture right now that makes it seem like everyone is supposed to do “great” things, “big” things, “extraordinary” things … some people surely will do these things. But most of us won’t. And yet we still have callings that matter just as much in doing what callings are meant to do: serve our neighbors and glorify God.

Q: You write, “Some roles might support our callings as temporary assignments, or perhaps they are roles we mistake for a calling.” Why do you think this is such a common mistake to make?

A: I think it’s a common mistake to make because we can’t see the future. We can’t see the role something we are doing right now will have in our future. We might think the thing we are doing now is not a calling and then find as years go on that it is our calling. On the other hand, we might be engaged in some assignment we think is our calling and later realize it was just a bridge to something else that is our calling. Again, being open-handed is key. Calling is something most of us discover along the way, so doing the best we can along that way will lead us more clearly to that discovery. Perhaps we make these mistakes because there is so much pressure to find that “one big calling” on our lives that, for most of us, is something that simply unfolds over time.

Q: In the church, and often in the larger society as well, many people tend to place family and career in direct opposition to each other, and run down careers as being the inferior use of one’s time. (I’m thinking of the popular saying, “Nobody ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office’ on their deathbed.”) But at the same time we in the church talk about God calling us to this or that career. If we really believe God does this, how should that reframe this conversation about the value of a career?

A: This is such a good question! It’s also a very modern question given that through most of human history work was for most people directly tied to supporting one’s family. “Career” is primarily a 20th-century notion, and it does seem to be severed, at least implicitly, from family. This is why I think “calling” and the idea of having multiple “callings” is more helpful. We can be called to several things at the same time (family, work, ministry, for example), and we need to balance them all into one cohesive whole as best we can. This is where I think (as I explain in the book) pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty both in and as our callings is so helpful. Grasping these transcendentals is ultimately grounding.

(Cover image copyright Brazos Press. Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.)

Book Links:

You Have a Calling on Amazon
You Have a Calling on Bookshop

Goodreads Links:

The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor
Charlie Can’t Sleep! by Rachel Joy Welcher, illustrated by Breezy Brookshire
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie
The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater

Note:

And now for something a little different: Tomorrow evening I’m doing a Substack Live with Amy Mantravadi to talk about classic movies! Hope you’ll tune in at 8:30 PM Eastern to watch — it’s going to be a fun one!