Servanthood — putting the needs of others first, thinking of how to help others have a better life — is the gateway to finding your calling.
We all know that walking in one’s calling gives life purpose and meaning. It makes life pleasant to live. You get up in the morning excited to go to work. At work, you are excited to serve and your joy shows in how you do the work. You want to do the most good. Working feels like nothing because you are working in your element. There is nothing in all the universe that is more powerful and animating to the human soul as walking in one’s calling. The pieces of life fit and make sense when you are walking in your calling.
But how do you get to that point of walking in your calling?
Recently, I was teaching three young medical doctors in our clinic where I serve as an assistant clinical professor of medicine in the Family Medicine department. Then I had a memorable encounter with a young medical doctor (a resident) whom I love and respect a lot. He is a very bright and intelligent young man.
I asked him what he wanted to do with his life as a doctor giving that he was going to graduate and be on his own soon. He told me he didn’t know. He was honest about it. He thought he could work in urgent care or do wound care. I asked him if he really liked wound care that much to do it full-time. As family doctors, we all do some level of wound care, but did he want to focus on it?
About urgent care, he had not done it before as well. Giving that I had just done an urgent care shift less than a week prior, I explained to him what it means to work in urgent care. Most of the time, you are basically triaging to see if something can wait for their primary care doctor to take care of it or if it is bad enough to go to the emergency room. Urgent care providers take care of the slim middle. I let him know that if he did urgent care for several years, he might lose many of the patient care skills he learned during residency that would allow him to serve as a primary care doctor or take care of patients in a hospital setting. I could tell he knew what I was said was right. At that point, he wasn’t sure what he would do at all.
Realizing that he was “lost”, I decided to help him. And by the way, most people are “lost” and don’t know what they should be doing with their life. I told him, to get out of that rut, you need to find your calling, you need to figure out what makes your heartbeat. The kind of work that, on your death bed, you would be happy that you spent your life doing. When you know what that is, what kind of practice you should have and what kind of environment and group of people you should be serving would become very easy.
Then there was a very genuine question that came from a person I could tell knew I was telling the truth and wanted to do that but didn’t know how to do it. “How do I find that thing that I’m put on earth to do?”
I told him, “you have to completely put the needs of others before your own”. Instead of starting with what you want to do and how much money you want to make, you start by genuinely surrendering yourself to the point where you ask yourself,
- what I am good
- what experiences do I have?
- who would I be able to serve the best and make their lives much better?
This surrender to serving others and prioritizing their needs is not yet the specific calling you are seeking but it is the gateway to it. Everyone who truly finds a specific calling must go through the gateway of self-less service to others. In a sense, one may say, we have two callings. The first and general calling is to serve others and the second is a more specific vocation that answers questions like what, who, where, when, and how, you are to serve.
I remember the words of my hero, mentor, and Lord Jesus Christ. He said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Come and go are verbs that describe what a person does when they have been called or sent. Jesus wasn’t called to be served but to serve others and give his life up as a sacrifice for many. However, his life didn’t end with the service and sacrifice. To the contrary, because he served sacrificially, he was glorified and given a name higher than every name in the whole universe. He was given so much authority that everyone will have to obey and serve him.
You don’t have to believe the same things I believe about Jesus’ life and the significance of his words. The principle remains, regardless. Another hero of mine, Martin Luther King Jr, believed the same things I am sharing with you about the power of serving.
I have experienced first hand this power of serving to open doors and guide one to one’s true calling in life. I have also read hundreds of books, articles, and sermons on the subject of calling and I have never seen a person who has found their true calling apart from service. The joy and privilege of finding and living calling are neither given to the lazy, the self-centered, nor the self-serving.
So, to find your calling, start serving and putting others before yourself. Put their interests first before yours. Lay what is most valuable to you on the altar so that you can serve others. And for the sake of those you have to serve, don’t ignore your needs and interests because as their servant, your needs have to be taken care of and you have to be healthy so that you can give them your best service. If you serve with that mindset, the heavens will open for you and your light will rise in the darkness. Your night will become like the noonday and your calling will become clear to you day after day, month after month, and year after year. You will be given a heavenly lamp for your feet and a glorious light for your path. You will be counted among the few that have the joy of living their calling every day.
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