Consider Your Calling: Six Questions for Discerning Your Vocation

What on earth is God doing?

Who are you?

What is your stage of life?

What are your circumstances?

What is the cross you will have to bear?

What are you afraid of?

We ask these six critical questions―and then weask them again―at points of transition in our lives. They all lead us to the one core question: What is the good work to which I am called?

Gordon T. Smith, author of Courage and Calling, writes: "It is a good question because our work matters to us, to others and, of course, it matters to God. Work itself is good. It is vital to our human identity; and we are most ourselves, most who God calls us to be, living in what it means to know the salvation of God, when we know the grace of work well done."

However, Smith acknowledges that this is not a simple question to answer in the midst of our very complicated lives. That's why he has written this brief and accessible book―to offer the support and insight we need as we ponder these six core questions in community with God and others.

As a steward of your life, in attentiveness to the calling of God, how is God inviting you to engage the world?

Gordon T. Smith is the president of Ambrose University and Seminary in Calgary, Alberta, where he also serves as professor of systematic and spiritual theology. He is an ordained minister with the Christian and Missionary Alliance and a teaching fellow at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of many books, including Institutional Intelligence, Called to Be Saints, and Your Calling Here and Now.