You Don’t Graduate from Discernment

By Paul Gutacker

“What’s hard about vocation is not that we have to guess what it is.

What’s hard is obeying…”

          As graduation season is upon us, I’m so grateful for Paul Gutacker’s reminder of something that never leaves us, even though we experience key transitions in life. Graduation season harkens vivid memories of my own cosmic transition 25 years ago from high school into the adult abyss. Reflecting on my own high school and college graduations and the relief of finishing those chapters in my life, I agree with every well-thought-out detail Paul has made here and recommend them as prescriptive for navigating life in the south side of heaven. Discernment is one skillset that constantly must be utilized, matured, and regularly applied if I want to live well to the best of my ability for Christ’s glory and honor. The choices and decisions I made 25 years ago have greatly impacted on the way I live today!...let’s sit with this for 5 seconds. While the time in the institutions ended, taking up my cross and following Christ does not cease.

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I still remember what it was like, as a senior in college, to hear the dreaded question: “What’s next?” Plenty of my friends had good answers. I didn’t. I was sure I was going to marry my college sweetheart (she in fact said yes). I knew I wanted to study certain subjects. I knew I needed to earn enough money to live and make my student loan payments. When the question came from well-meaning professors, friends, and future in-laws, I fumbled for an answer, trying not to visibly panic.

Since then, I’ve learned my story isn’t unique: Many soon-to-be-graduates don’t know what’s next. Many feel something must have gone wrong. After four years of study and formation, we think, wasn’t I meant to have my whole life mapped out and immediately use my degree to provide financially and make a meaningful difference in the world? Why am I about to walk across the stage without my vocation figured out?

            That word vocation is at the heart of graduation-season anxiety. Many worry that if they don’t launch straightaway into a meaningful career, they’re missing their vocation. But this has very little to do with a biblical understanding of vocation.

If you want your post-college “bridge years” to be fruitful and not just anxiety-ridden, or if you’re walking alongside a recent graduate, we need to return to what Scripture teaches about vocation. Here are five things graduates can hold onto in this season:

 

1. Your vocation is not unique to you.

Vocation comes from the Greek vocare, “to be called.” The apostle Paul really liked this word, addressing believers in Rome and in Corinth as “called ones,” or “invited ones” (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2). In Paul’s letters, vocation is tied to being called by God: We’ve been called to participate in God’s kingdom plan of redemption through Christ. And crucially, in all of this, Paul is addressing churches, not individuals. The most important aspects of your vocation, your calling, are common to all Christians. Put another way, while God’s call is personal, it is never individual. It is a call to be part of a people.

2. Your vocation is not primarily (or even secondly) about your career.

We live, as philosopher Josef Pieper put it, in a world of “total work.” Writing in Europe as it sought to rebuild after World War II, Pieper argued that the modern world makes work our identity: Work spreads “to cover and include the whole of human activity and even of human life.” In other words, we are what we achieve and produce. If Pieper’s diagnosis is right, no wonder that when we speak about vocation, we’re usually talking about our career.

To be sure, work is part of being human. Working hard, earning a wage, and being productive are all good things. The problem is that vocation and occupation aren’t interchangeable. Instead, the Bible makes clear that our vocation, God’s call on our lives, is fundamental. Christ calls us, just as he called his disciples, saying, “Come, follow me” (Matt. 4:19).

Following Christ has implications for every aspect of life, and responding to God’s call should make a difference in why and how (and perhaps even in what field) one works. But a career is likely not even secondary to a person’s vocation. Likely, paid work is less central to following God’s call than things like loving your family, caring for your neighbor, serving others, and perhaps even pursuing hobbies or unpaid work. These may be more essential to your vocation.

 

3. Your vocation is not a secret plan for your life that God will only reveal if you crack the code.

When I listen to students talk about vocation, it sometimes sounds like they’re trying to solve a riddle or decode a secret message. It’s as if God designed them for one specific career path but refuses to give them the map. We’ve already challenged this notion by remembering that vocation is primarily corporate. But it’s also not a riddle or a secret. It’s something clearly laid out for you.

Listen to some things Paul makes quite clear: Your calling doesn’t have anything to do with your abilities (1 Cor. 1:18–31); your calling is something bestowed on you by God (Rom. 11); your calling is eschatologically oriented toward your final hope (Eph. 13–14); your calling is about holiness (2 Tim. 1:9); and God is making you worthy of your calling (2 Thess. 1:11). Notice how many of these come from the opening lines of Paul’s epistles. There’s nothing hidden here. Paul wants you to get it, so he says it right up front.

             What’s hard about vocation is not that we have to guess what it is. What’s hard is obeying. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Our vocation is to follow Christ to the Cross.

 

4. Your vocation is not something you figure out between the ages of 20 and 23 and then coast on for the rest of your life.

If the heart of your vocation is clear—it’s the way of the Cross—you still need to discern what to do with your days. This discernment isn’t something you’ll finish this year, or next. You won’t figure out your vocation at age 25 and be done with it.

            One reason is practical: Life won’t go the way you expect. If you’re graduating in 2026, you’ll change jobs on average every 3.2 years. Your generation moves around more, buys a first home later, and marries both less and older. Your life will be more fluid and less permanent than that of your predecessors. That might excite you or make you anxious or both. Regardless, it means you’ll never be done asking, How should I follow Christ?

You don’t graduate from vocational discernment, because the Christian life requires ongoing repentance. We need moments in our days and in the church year (like the season of Lent) when we pause to remember our mortality, to take a long, hard look at our sin and to ask, once again, “How can I turn back to you, Lord? From what do I need to turn away?”

Because life holds many twists and turns, and because we’re never done repenting, discernment isn’t something from which we move on.

 

5. Your vocation is as much about the present as it is about the future.

Finally, it’s tempting to think of vocational discernment as figuring out something that happens in the future, about making plans or large life choices. There’s nothing wrong with making a plan, but planning can easily distract us from the present. Worse still, our planning can be spiritually dangerous when it makes us feel like we’re in control of lives. To those of us addicted to planning, Christ asks: “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matt. 6:27).

Discernment is less about the future and more about what God is doing right now. As theologian Gordon Smith puts it, “To discern well we must pay attention: we need to observe and listen (3LO2237), noting what is happening around us and within us and attending to what others are saying.” In other words, discernment requires noticing what God is doing and seeking to participate in his work. We can only hear Christ’s call when he speaks to us—here and now. One way to avoid answering Christ is to obsess over the future, to fixate on our plans, dreams, and anxieties.

If you’re coming up on graduation, you’ve likely been in a season of life that’s all about discerning your vocation. Whether or not you have plans lined up or are still wondering what to do, it’s a weighty time.

Thankfully, your vocation doesn’t hinge on what comes right after graduation. The most important aspects of your calling (vocaré) have already been given to you. Your vocation is not defined by what you’ll go on to achieve. Instead, you’ve been invited to belong to God’s people, to hear and respond to Christ’s call to follow him to the Cross. And the work of discerning how to follow this call isn’t something you’ll wrap up by May. And for someone who keeps getting the “What’s next?” question, this is very good news.

 

Source: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/04/you-dont-graduate-from-discernment/

The Good Old Days - Were They?

Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.
—Ecclesiastes 7:10

By Ken Collins

     Life was easy in the fifties. Most of the shows on television were about cowboys. The good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats and it was easy to tell them apart. The good guys never did bad things, and the bad guys never did good things. The television shows that were not about cowboys were about happy, loving families, such as Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, or they were about superheroes, such as Superman, who was always on the side of right and his personal faults never tripped him up.

     But those days were not really so good, you only remember them that way. What you forget as you reminisce about the fifties is the terror of that decade. We began with the hysteria of the red scare and ended it terrified of the bomb. On the weekend, we went to the local school to see the latest fallout shelters, which if we had enough money, we could bury in our backyards so that we could survive the nuclear holocaust. No matter what town it was, everyone in it knew that they were the number one target on the Russians’ list. We stared up into the nighttime sky in fear and awe at Sputnik, the first artificial satellite ever to orbit the earth, and in our terror we flocked to the theaters to watch movies about oppressive invaders from outer space. In those days, a black family traveling cross-country to visit relatives had to sleep in the car, because ‘decent’ motels didn’t take colored people. Instead of eating in restaurants, they had to satisfy themselves with a specially designated take-out window, and they had to plan their route to avoid towns where the ‘decent folk’ didn’t like colored people driving through.
     Later we discovered that the actors who portrayed our domestic ideals on the television tube did not live them in their daily lives. They suffered divorce and went through child custody battles; they had drug problems, and George Reeves, who was the 1950’s Superman, ended his life with a gun to his head. Many of the he-men whose manliness we admired at the movies turned out to have been gay all along. The ‘decency’ that separated black and white in the fifties is now an unspeakable moral failing. Nothing turned out to be what it seemed at the time! Not only were our pleasures illusions, our terrors were as well, and as for the Communist Bloc we feared so much—it evaporated like a bad dream at the dawn of a new day.
     The sixties weren’t any better. We began that decade with the assassination of the president of the United States and ended it with the Viet Nam war and filled the middle with racial strife. The seventies contained the inglorious end to the Viet Nam war, the resignation of a president, and war veterans who were denied the glory we promised them.
I could go on and on, but my point is clear: the good old days aren’t good, they are just old. And so, Ecclesiastes tells us not to ask why the old days were better than these, because such a question arises, not from wisdom, but from amnesia.
     Would you like to go back to the fifties in a time machine? I don’t think so. Even though you know how things turned out, it isn’t a place most of us would like to live. Back then, hearing aids were the size of paperback books, there were no computers, television was only black and white, and there was no air conditioning in private homes. There was no Heimlich maneuver, no CPR, no open-heart surgery, and no effective treatment for epilepsy, depressive disorders, or migraine headaches. Remember whiplash? There were no headrests, seat belts, or airbags in cars, and most of the good highways had not yet been built.
     So why do we forget the trials, tribulations, and troubles of former times and remember them fondly? Why do we yearn to return to a time in which we lived in terror day and night?
We remember them as the good old days, because we know how they turned out. We have anxiety about the present age, because we do not know how things will turn out, and in being anxious, we reveal our lack of faith.

Jesus says,

In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
—John 16:33b, NIV

And John says:

There is no fear in love, for perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
—1 John 4:18, NIV

     We fear the present age, because we do not know how it will turn out. We fear, because we do not believe that Jesus has truly overcome the world, and we fear because we do not love Him or trust Him as we ought.
     But if we truly believe that Jesus could die upon a cross and raise Himself up from the dead on the third day; if we truly believe that on the fortieth day He ascended into heaven and sits, alive and well, at the right hand of God, who is His Father, then why do we fear the present age? When we ride a roller coaster, we scream in terror in the middle, but beneath that terror we trust the management, that no true harm will come to us. If we can trust the management of a rickety roller-coaster ride, why can we not trust the Management of the Universe? When will we stop hiring false teachers to encourage our fears and to magnify our anxieties? We know from past experience that our fears are baseless and our anxieties are pointless. We know from past experience that the false teachers who encourage us to be fearful and anxious are working for their own profit and will end their own careers in scandal. Why then do we follow them and not trust Jesus? If Jesus rising from the dead is not enough of a sign for us, what will it take to shake us from our anxieties? What will it take to get us to stop luxuriating in our fear?
     For if Jesus can raise Himself from the dead, and if He promises to do the same at the end of the age for anyone who trusts Him, and if you truly trust Him, then there is no terror you cannot face. For even if you are defeated and cast down and betrayed and backstabbed and slandered—and even if you die and everyone forgets you—Jesus will give you triumph over all the terrors of this life. And looking back on these days, as you look back on the days of old, you will see that your terrors had no substance, your anxieties had no cause, and your trust was not misplaced.
     Why do you wait until the Last Day to enjoy this peace, which you now possess?

Source: http://www.kencollins.com/life/hope-27.htm