A vocation is not always a profession. Our purpose and life passion may not be what pays bills or puts food on our table, and that’s alright. Purpose and vocation are not a focus for immanent needs but on something more that stirs our souls and raises sense and connection to a Higher.
Don’t worry if we don’t see results. Don’t be bothered if vocation lives unrecognized, dismissed, or demeaned. There is a timing and purpose to all: on God’s time, not ours.
Vocations serve this, a transcendent we sometimes sense but can hardly see: so much more than preoccupations in the now. We should live our vocations still, even when they doesn’t make sense and there is no reward beyond doing as our spirits feel called.
Maybe that is the reward: to live as we are called.
(In the early eighteenth-century France, there lived a priest by the name of Louis de Montfort who wrote and recorded sermons given throughout the countryside of his parish. In 1716, at the age of 43, he died mostly unknown to all but the few to whom he preached: a good, but undistinguished life.
Yet, in 1842, a transcript of a book was found in a storage chest of a convent, hidden and forgotten through time of the French Revolution when erudite “enlightenment” sought to eradicate the wisdom and ways of what, before, was known by the same word: wisdom and God being supplanted by knowledge and objectivism.
By this book, discovered and then shared more than a century after his own death, Montfort fulfilled further his vocation, inspired many beyond his own purposeful, but limited life, and became canonized a saint in 1957, over two-hundred years after his life that, at time, left seemingly little wave.
“Don’t worry if we don’t see results. Don’t be bothered if vocation lives unrecognized, dismissed, or demeaned. There is a timing and purpose to all: on God’s time, not ours.”)