What Am I Supposed to Do with My Life? On Vocation, Discernment, and Grateful Trust in God’s Call

Editors’ Note: This is the final article in a week-long series offering practical advice for adolescents and young adults in the areas of family formation, vocation, career, and friendship.  

Gentle reader of any age, you are most welcome to listen in. But I’m primarily addressing my fellow twenty-somethings. I’ve been asked to offer advice to you in particular on the topic of vocation—not just religious vocation, important though that is, but vocation in the broader sense. 

Hold on!—you may be saying—Did he say fellow twenty-somethings? 

Fair enough—I’m in my seventies. But stay with me. While I’ve spent time thinking and even writing about vocation, what qualifies me most to speak may simply be that I was once in my twenties. 

Yes, I know—we all were. But not all of us spent the first half of our twenties, as I did, so utterly clueless about what to do with our lives. And equally clueless about how to go about figuring it out. And so terribly disconcerted by that state of affairs. 

So I’m going back. I’m in my twenties again—that utterly pivotal decade in my life and in the lives of so many others—recalling that my chief difficulty during those years was being unsettled. I couldn’t move forward because I wasn’t sure where to commit myself amid the various appealing (or not) alternatives—and a few others that only pretended to be options before quietly disqualifying themselves. I felt the anxiety of not knowing what path I should take, even as I deeply wanted to know. So I waited, wondered, and worried about how to find out what I was meant to do. Looking back, I ask myself: what did I need to hear then? 

I would have been well advised to reflect on the word vocation. 

Don’t be spooked by that word. It refers to absolutely everyone’s call, which, after all, is what vocation means. While I won’t be pushing the idea of religious vocation in particular, a relationship with God remains critical.  For if a vocation is a call, someone is obviously doing the calling—and that can only be God. 

Vocation, in this deeper sense, isn’t just about choosing a state in life. It’s God’s ongoing call to live the unique life of good deeds he has prepared for each of us—one faithful choice at a time. 

Of course, vocation is sometimes used in ways far removed from that meaning, for example, as a synonym for whatever career one happens to select, even if purely on the basis of what is least taxing and most lucrative. But that corruption of the word does not detract from its true meaning. 

God’s Call and Our Response 

The conviction that God really does have a plan—really does call us—is absolutely central. Everything else depends on it. Vocation only makes sense if we believe that God exists, that he sees us and cares for us, and that he calls us not just to avoid evil and do some generic good, but to carry out the particular good entrusted to us—the unique mission he reveals in stages over time and invites us to embrace with all our heart. 

From a Christian perspective, this conviction—that God has a plan for each of us—takes on even deeper meaning. We believe that Jesus Christ, who gave his life for the salvation of the world, invites us to cooperate in his ongoing work of love and redemption. Vocation, then, is not just about finding fulfillment or doing good in general. It is a call to contribute, in a unique and personal way, to God’s larger plan to heal, restore, and renew. That’s why the idea of vocation carries such weight: it connects the particulars of our daily choices to something much greater than ourselves. 

If we believe all of this, we’re in a position to grasp a lot of other truths about vocation. One of those truths is that God wants to reveal his plan to us. Those who are tempted to think they simply can’t discern God’s will should remember this. But this truth must be properly understood. It does not mean he intends to reveal it all at once. He reveals what we need to know when we need to know it—and not before. Why is that? 

One reason is surely that God knows we derive great spiritual benefit from faithfully waiting when we don’t yet know what his plan concretely involves, trusting him to make it clear in due time. Of course, this presupposes that we’ve truly sought his will, and that our ignorance is not due to avoidance or refusal, but to his wise decision to wait until what he knows to be the favorable time to communicate his will. 

Still, God doesn’t keep us in suspense forever. Yes, he wants us to receive the grace of exercising radical trust—of staying faithful to him through times of uncertainty—but he does ultimately want us to know his will. It would hardly make sense for him to have a plan if he didn’t want us to discover it at the proper time and cooperate with him in carrying it out. 

The conviction that our benevolent Lord has a plan for our lives also helps us grasp the truth that it is in our own best interests to discern it and faithfully live it out. For the God who created us wills our good. He is far more interested in our welfare than even we ourselves are, and we benefit far more by cooperating with him than by following even the noblest plan of our own making. 

But cooperating with God’s plan comes at a cost. We tend to build up our own agendas—lists of things we assume are necessary for our happiness—and our attachment to those assumptions can make it hard to accept that God may ask us to give them up, even when they involve things that are genuinely good. For, again, God doesn’t merely call us to do what is generically good, but to respond to the specific mission he has chosen us for. This is implied in the word vocation. Following him, then, can be costly because it sometimes requires surrendering even good things that would interfere with the greater good he intends for us. 

Following the Plan with Gratitude 

The proper and natural motivation to discover and follow God’s plan is the recognition that it leads to our true good—even if following it requires humbly repenting of what we now see was not. But that recognition can and should give rise to a nobler motivation: gratitude. For when we see that God’s plan is shaped by love and aimed at our greatest happiness—when we remember that Christ gave himself for us—we are moved not only to follow that plan for our own sake. We’re moved to follow it out of grateful trust in the One who desires our good even more than we do, and who laid down his life to make our cooperation possible. 

Another reason for gratitude (one we rarely speak of) is that God, in calling us, invites us to share in the work of saving others. From a Christian perspective, our fidelity doesn’t just shape our own destiny; it becomes part of how God draws others to himself. Someone we encounter might be at real risk of missing out on the life, here and hereafter, that God desires for him or her—and without our witness, might never find the way. Yet when we respond to our vocation, even in quiet or hidden ways, our lives can become instruments of grace. In cooperating with God’s plan, we don’t just prepare for the kingdom—we help others reach it. 

Faithfulness, Clarity, and the Kingdom 

Given what’s at stake in our response to God’s call, another crucial insight becomes clear: we can only truly discern God’s will if we begin with absolute clarity about what God could not possibly will. Vocation, rightly understood, involves a response to a call from a holy and loving God. That means certain options are excluded from the start. It makes no sense, for example, to try to discern whether to cheat on an exam, have an affair, or underpay a worker. Yet some people attempt just that, and in doing so, open themselves to self-deception. They may interpret the benefits they hope to gain as signs of divine favor and dismiss the sting of conscience as mere scrupulosity. But any authentic discernment of vocation requires a conscience formed by truth and a willingness to reject whatever is incompatible with God’s goodness. 

Reflecting on the meaning of vocation can also protect us from discouragement when we look back and see that many things we attempted didn’t work out. We sometimes expect our lives to resemble a cathedral—beautiful, harmonious, and perfectly proportioned. But more often, they look like a patchwork: this job or relationship worked for a time, then faltered; that effort led somewhere for a while, then didn’t. The problem lies not in our lives, but in the expectation itself. We’re not called to build the cathedral of the kingdom, as though we could construct the city of God by our own design. Rather, as the Second Vatican Council taught in one of its key documents, we are called to prepare the material God will use. 

And construction sites are messy. From the outside, a yard full of stone, wood, and half-finished plans may not look like much, but if we remain faithful, God transforms our imperfect efforts into something far greater. In the end, we may be astonished to see how beautifully he has used what we offered. As that same Council document goes on to affirm, we rightly hope to find all the good fruit of our labor not lost or wasted but gathered up and woven into the kingdom he alone can complete. 

If my younger self had understood even this much—that discernment begins with recognizing one’s gifts and offering them, detached from any personal agenda, for God’s purposes—I might have spent a little less time anxiously waiting for the clouds to part. I might have spent more time offering the little I had, trusting that God could use it for his purposes. And in the giving, I might have found, perhaps a little sooner, the way forward beginning to open before me. 

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