Work

A recent email newsletter included the following section written by Frederick Buechner about work:

“And I found work to do. By the time I was sixteen, I knew as surely as I knew anything that the work I wanted to spend my life doing was the work of words. I did not yet know what I wanted to say with them. I did not yet know in what form I wanted to say it or to what purpose. But if a vocation is as much the work that chooses you as the work you choose, then I knew from that time on that my vocation was, for better or worse, to involve that searching for, and treasuring, and telling of secrets which is what the real business of words is all about.” -Originally published in The Sacred Journey

“The work of words.” What an interesting approach to thinking about work vs thinking about a job. We rarely ask kids “what work would you like to do?” – rather we ask “what do you want to be?”. The latter question focuses on titles and community place and often money. The former question focuses on skills and talents, and then moving towards finding place to utilize those gifts.

Why do we spend so little time helping our children to find interests and their gifts and talents – how they have been created – and so much time looking at jobs? And THEN we spend countless hours trying to help adults discover their gifting, their interests, and reimagine their lives.

Maybe the exhortation to “raise up a child in the way they should go” (Proverbs 22:6) has as much to do with helping them discover how God has created them as it does with pointing them to God.