This week’s guest contributor is L. Roger Owens. Roger serves as the Hugh Thomson Kerr Professor of Pastoral Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, where he teaches in the areas of spirituality, preaching, and leadership. He has pastored both United Methodist and Presbyterian churches in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Owens is also the author of a number of books, including “Everyday Contemplative: The Way of Prayerful Living” and “What We Need Is Here: Practicing the Heart of Christian Spirituality.” I’ll be back with new reflections next week! – Prince 

I recently taught a doctor of ministry course on Thomas Merton, the 20th-century monk. The class met in a large room and every student had a microphone stationed on the table in from of them. We looked like a miniature meeting of the United Nations, which was ironic, since the UN is on the front lines of action in the world — Merton, a monk and poet, seemed just the opposite. 

The students, many of them pastors who are also creative writers, wrestled with the call to write when the world is on fire. “I’m 100 pages into my novel,” one minister said, “and it’s hard for me to see how this matters. But my spiritual director says I have to finish it.” 

Art might not seem urgent. Prayer might not, either. And we live in a time of cascading urgencies. War in Gaza and Ukraine. Economic instability. A climate in crisis. A threatened democracy. The heartless targeting of nonviolent immigrants for deportation. What business does anyone have writing a poem when somewhere there is a protest to attend? 

If everyone had the same vocation, our churches — and the world — would be in deep trouble. But vocation doesn’t work that way. Thomas Kelly, an early 20th-century Quaker mystic, wrote, “By inner persuasions [God] draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God’s burdened heart particularizing [God’s] burdens in us.” In one leader that particularization might look like organizing acts of civil disobedience; in others it might look like writing, praying or making music. 

Here’s the key: We need to trust that God is calling leaders — and congregations — to various meaningful commitments. One’s vocation, in this moment, does not have to mirror another’s. Each will bear God’s burdened heart for the world in unique ways, surrendering what they can’t do or be to God, trusting that God is shaping other forms of service in other people and communities.    

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Before you go

Many of us have a multiplicity of vocations within us vying for our attention. My students were discerning how to find space in their lives for writing, alongside all of their other passions. The challenge we face comes not only from comparing our vocations with those of others, but in struggling to embrace the most meaningful call — the one or two among the many within us — that need our nurturing now. 

Try this: Consider the many vocations within you. Listen to them. Then list them. (If I were doing this, I might write: teacher, writer, pastor, spouse and father.) What does each one want of you? Which one needs your attention now? How do you know? If you were to draw a Venn diagram of these callings, what name would you give the place where they overlap? 

Once a month I sneak from my church office and head to a poetry group that meets at the library across the street. I’m called to that. Yes, there are things more urgent than meter and rhyme. But for those two hours, I need to trust God with those things, just as God is trusting us in the group to write something beautiful — which the world also desperately needs.