When Vocations Compete

by John Rasmussen

Sometimes I feel like there’s just not enough hours in the day. Trying to responsibly balance different areas of our lives can be a challenge at best. In my experience, this challenge becomes more complex the more I realize the importance of my vocations. Simply put, vocation is what you do. Vocation is your unique place in life through which God sustains and provides for his creation. We all have multiple vocations. Some of us are spouses. Some are parents. Some are students. Others have vocations related to our daily work, whether or not that work receives compensation. We are citizens, church members, volunteers… the list goes on and on.

First of all, our vocations are unique to us as individuals. I am the only one who has the vocation of husband to my wife. Therefore, God has given me a unique set of responsibilities toward my wife that no one else can fulfill. If you have children, you are the only father or mother to that child – under most circumstances, no one fills that role except you. In other words, God provides a certain aspect of his loving care through you and no one else. The more we understand this truth, the more we realize the high calling and importance of our vocations. In other words, we realize how much is demanded of us in daily life. Here enters the tension we often feel as we are pulled between the demands of competing vocations. In a perfect world, there would be no collisions between work deadlines, midterms, little league baseball games, and wedding anniversaries. But God is still at work in the chaos. Jesus tells his disciples in Luke 9:23, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” We don’t deny ourselves in imaginary situations outside of reality. We deny ourselves within the context of the demands of our vocations. In fact, you could say that our sanctification (the living out of our justification) is played out in vocation. Sanctification often (but not always) involves a certain level of suffering. One aspect of that suffering involves the pull and pressure of competing vocations. For example, as a graduate student with a full time job and a spouse, what do you do when the demands of work and school relentlessly prevent you from needed time with your better half? Either way you''ll be dropping the ball. The trick is picking which ball is more important. School and work may come and go. The same should never be said of your spouse. In this case, vocations are competing, but one naturally wins out over the other. People come first. Other priorities come second. With that said, sometimes the decision for one competing vocation over the other is not as simple. At that point, to quote Luther, "sin boldly." Make the best decision you can and leave the rest to God. For example, this quarter I'm taking an overload of classes in preparation for our second child. It is inevitable that one of those classes will be relegated tot he status of "blow-off class." I show up as often as I can, but if there's ever a conflict between completing my reading and watching the Cardinals beat the Brewers with my family (as I write this the series is 1-1, so I may take that back), I usually pick the game over a book about 16th century heretics. Some would call that being a bad student. I call it being healthy. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and that's more than enough.