Where has God placed you? How can you bring glory to God in that place? John Stonestreet’s book Restoring All Things: God’s Audacious Plan to Change the World through Everyday People closes with a good reminder to every Christian. Whatever your life situation, there is a way to apply the Christian worldview to what you do and how you interact with people. There is a way to bring redemptive life to the people you encounter, to your profession, and to those whom you serve through your work.
Over the course of a week, we find ourselves in all kinds of personal and social settings: at work, at home, at church, in our communities, at the voting booth, at the store, and around our neighborhoods. Once we identify the places we spend our time, we can identify the relationships we have in those spaces. Then we can begin to think through the needs of these places and what we might do to join God’s work there.
Underneath this exercise is the classic Christian understanding of vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, which means “to call.” Today, vocation is often confused with occupation, or what we do to make a living. The Protestant Reformers understood vocation differently. They understood anywhere and everywhere we go as our “stations,” situations and relationships ordained by God for us.
This idea of “station” is key. If we see the various situations and relationships in our lives as accidental, we will never have a proper understanding of vocation. Instead, we should see our various stations as places and people to which God has called us. A calling, after all, requires a “caller.” As Paul told the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers during his famous “Mars Hill” sermon, “[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17: 26).
So God determines when and where we live. It is no accident where we find ourselves, whether in Budapest or Boston, in Singapore or Soddy Daisy, Tennessee. And it is no accident if we are brothers, daughters, employees, neighbors, and citizens. God is writing our stories into His Grand Narrative of the Story of All Things....
[W]e must embrace that all Christians, not just professional ministers and nonprofit leaders, have sacred vocations.... It simply is not true that a person’s calling is more sacred on the basis of where they work. To be Christian is to be called to God’s redeeming work in the world. And anyone who is in Christ can and should seek to glorify God wherever they are.
At Stand to Reason, our goal is not to train apologists; our goal is to train apologist bankers, and apologist janitors, and apologist mothers and fathers—people who apply the Christian worldview and the work of Jesus to every aspect of their lives, wherever they are.
God has called you to the place where you are right now. Every corner of our culture is in need of people who will treat the human beings around them as bearers of God’s image, who will reflect the beauty of God’s kindness, love, truthfulness, justice, and grace to the world, who will honor God with excellence in their work, who will beat back evil and chaos, and who will share the truth about Jesus with those who are broken and lost.
Wherever you are right now, God has called you there to do this.