Seeking a Life Well Lived

Karen Swallow Prior, You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. Brazos Press, 2025. $21.99, 160 pp.

When she was 64, New York Times bestselling author and long-time professor Nell Painter retired from Princeton University. The typical post-retirement trajectory for an award-winning academic historian would have been to keep writing and publishing additional books. She could have even ramped up her publishing agenda, now that she was no longer teaching and advising dissertations. Instead, Painter went back to school—to art school, specifically, earning first a BFA and then an MFA in painting. Since then, she launched her second career as a painter. Given her last name, perhaps this was fated all along. She also wrote a memoir reflecting on this experience—Old in Art School. 

For an outsider looking at Painter’s experience, it is easy to wonder: Which one of these is her true vocation? Should she have always been a painter, and was her previous life as a historian wasted? Or could she have had multiple callings over the course of her distinguished life? At least, we can say, she certainly demonstrated as great a passion for her art as she previously had for history. And considering how competitive art school admissions are, Painter showed sufficient talent and promise to break into this field.

Painter is one extreme—someone who has always had a strong feeling of being called to do something at each phase of her life, and so she just did it. Moreover, she did it well. But here’s another story. A few years ago, I found myself in a brief conversation with two teens who were about to graduate from high school. I asked them what they were looking forward to most in the next stage in life. One of them responded: “retirement.” He was not planning to go to college, he was not excited about the low-wage job he was planning to work (although he had yet to find it), and he thought the best thing left for him in life going forward was retirement. In other words, here was someone who had no sense of calling at all. Just lowkey despair. 

Both extremes readily came to mind while reading Karen Swallow Prior’s new book, You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. “You have a calling,” she states matter-of-factly in opening the book. “In fact, you have more than one calling. Indeed, you will have various callings over the course of your lifetime.” Most people can agree—cue Painter. The problem is, how can anyone know what their calling (or callings) are? This difficult question too often gets elided with another difficult question—that of work or career. That is, indeed, what we most often mean today when we speak of calling or vocation. Furthermore, if you don’t have a strong sense of calling to do something—“if your calling didn’t come roaring into your ears like thunder rolling down from the mountains, so loud it was impossible to ignore”—well, you too might just find yourself looking forward to retirement too. 

And so, Prior begins with the problem of how we view work. In our society today, work has a reputation as something that is not fun. Just consider Wendell Berry’s description in The Need to Be Whole of people who go through life counting down to the end of each workday, so they could start living. Then they count down to the end of each work week, so they could enjoy the weekend. They count down to holidays and vacations, and they count down to retirement too, to be sure. But when are these living dead actually living? 

To think about work rightly, we must order it rightly in our affections. We should not make it into a religion of workism, an idol that reigns supreme in our lives. Yet we should also not dismiss it as something that is so awful, we wish we didn’t have to do it at all. Both of these extremes are common right now, and the key to resolving both is to think about work in theological terms. How does God think about work? Put simply, “God works. He made us as creatures designed to join him in his work here on earth.” This makes work, even the most mundane and ordinary work, something potentially holy. 

But there is another dimension at hand, which we miss whenever we obsess over whether we are in the right career field. By conflating all our callings with paid work, we are overlooking the importance of other callings we possess as well. For much of world history, people didn’t analyze the paid work aspect of calling—farmers pursued farming just like their parents and grandparents had done, while various craftsmen passed on the family trade as well, training their children to succeed them, and generally not giving those children much of an option. Many people in the past also didn’t agonize nearly as much as we do over whether to get married and to whom, whether or not to have kids, or do myriad other things that require serious decisions on our part—and many of which connect to the callings on our life. 

There is no question about it. Life in the modern world is filled with decisions and options. That may seem nice at first, but there are simply too many decisions we must make at various junctions in our lives and too many options for each one. Perhaps it is a mark of privilege that we have so many choices and can expend valuable time and mental headspace on weighing each one. More often than not, though, this feels like yet another curse of our age. Christians struggle with how to process it all: “One form of paralysis that plagues the modern church is rooted in the unbiblical language of ‘God’s perfect plan’ for your life. The good news is that God has no such perfect plan for your life! There is no blueprint that includes what job you should have, whom you should marry, and where you should live. So you can do away with all the anxiety about any accidental missteps away from God’s road map for your life.”

So what is the answer? This is where pursuing the true, good, and beautiful comes into play, Prior is convinced. There are certain basic precepts that Christians specifically must accept. Pursuing one’s calling should require walking in truth all the days of one’s life, because that is what all Christians are called to do. And a life spent pursuing God is a life spent seeking truth, goodness, and beauty. These parameters organically narrow down career options, as certain pursuits are simply not appropriate for believers. But these precepts are about much more than just what job one should seek. At the end, the Sunday School answer helps us reflect on the difficulties of discerning calling: Jesus is the answer. All else will fall into place. As someone who was forced to walk away from a lifelong academic career two years ago, Prior knows what she is talking about here. Unlike Painter, Prior did not get to continue in her academic career until retirement. Instead, Prior had to figure out a new career with little advance notice, which forced her to think yet again about her many overlapping callings. Endings are terrifying, and the many unknowns rocked her world. But God. 

Prior’s book is both immensely encouraging and immensely frustrating all at once—and for the same reasons. Anyone seeking an advice book with concrete answers will find that this is not that kind of book—unless you would like your career advice to come in the shape of poems and spiritual meditations on the beauty of life, nature, and literature. And yet, that is the point. In a world filled with so many advice books for how to live your life, this is the advice we all truly need. Seek God first, and if you fill your life with beauty, it will be a life well lived.