I looked to resources around me to speak to me while God was, to my mind, remaining silent. Maybe, I thought, if I can understand my strengths and weaknesses to a tee, I’ll be able to pinpoint what work God has in store for me. I took personality tests, made appointments with career counselors, and relentlessly questioned my friends and family about the merits of various career paths, schools, and life decisions. Throughout this process, which took place primarily during my junior and senior years of high school, I gained some insight into my identity, at least by human standards, but I was far from satisfied. The test results, personality profiles, and vague advice from friends and acquaintances left me filled with uncertainty and teetering on the edge of anxiety. When would God reveal himself to me? Would I have to wait until the final days before the deadline for graduate school applications to have assurance of what my life was supposed to look like? And what would happen if I chose the wrong course of life? Would God rescind his blessings from my life and leave me alone, uncertain, and uninspired? When I began my summer internship with the Duke Chapel PathWays program in June of 2010, I hoped I had reached the pivotal moment I had envisioned for so long. According to the program director, Keith Daniel, the purpose of the summer internship was primarily to provide time and space for students to enter into a process of discernment about their personal vocation and calling. I couldn’t imagine a better time for God to reveal Himself. Filled with expectations, I began my internship at a tutoring center in Durham, hoping that God would confirm that His plan for me was to teach children and take on the vocational role of an educator. However, my internship was not the affirming experience that I had expected. Instead of confirming a direct and distinct path for my future, those weeks offered only exhaustion and confusion. God opened my eyes to huge realms of weakness and uncertainty, both
on a personal scale and in structures and societies beyond me. I realized I had no idea how to control a classroom of rambunctious sixth-graders, I had trouble empathizing with the lives of the students who lived in the under-served community around the tutoring center, and I struggled to see how my two semesters at Duke had prepared me to show God’s love in a raw, real world. On another level, as I spent more time with the wonderful people who worked together to run the tutoring center, I sensed that my understanding of calling was falling apart. Gradually, the details of the lives of those I served with slipped out in small episodes and hurried exchanges: sometimes during a moment of relative peace behind the wheel of a car, or maybe in a few stolen seconds of conversation over a ten-minute lunch break. I discovered that my supervisor Christina had given up the prospect of a secure career as an elementary school teacher to run the after-school tutoring program at the Life Center.
Reflecting upon how God “might be molding us or encouraging certain character qualities or desires is critical to the process of vocational discernment.
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She also put in time at Durham’s Salvation Army and sometimes the Boys and Girls club in order to fill her workweek and make ends meet. Christina’s days were always long and often peppered with discouraging encounters and frustrating situations. Nevertheless, she was overwhelmingly devoted to the students that she served. Part of the explanation for Christina’s baffling perseverance, I gradually realized, was her conviction that her work was ministerial, a conception that challenged my traditional 5 Religio Spring 2011