You Don’t Need a Calling

Success won’t fix you.

Your purpose is bigger than that.

We think we want success, wealth, or fame but what we really want underneath all that is connection. Capitalism exploits our desire for connection and promises that we’ll get the love, attention, and validation we seek on the other side of success. But that doesn’t work. You can experience the connection you want right now.

You don’t need to become a better version of you to make yourself lovable.

You are being lied to. The cure for loneliness isn’t to become more rich, attractive, and accomplished. We work so hard to improve ourselves just to be lovable, valuable, and worthy of community, as if it’s something we have to earn. It was always just propaganda to make us work more and consume more. You can be free from those lies.

Our profit-driven system tricks us into seeing ourselves as failures if we’re not constantly improving.

Life is more wild and beautiful than that.

Both mainstream politics and mainstream religion teach that the point of life to get better and better until you become the ideal version of you that you were called to be. This narrow view of calling makes us feel like life hasn’t really started yet until we get everything right. Then we look down at ourselves from the perspective of that imagined ideal self from an imaginary mountaintop and we see ourselves as failures.

When I was a minister I used to teach people that God had a specific plan for our lives that we’re called to follow. But my wild and unpredictable journey in and out of traditional ministry has revealed to me that God isn’t actually in some other world with a narrow script for our lives. God is experiencing this life with us, giving us small and simple callings in every moment.

You don’t need a calling.

You need community.

It’s through community that we encounter the small and simple callings in life. Your purpose is how you show up in the world. And the only calling you need is found when you show up for your people.

For anyone disillusioned by the idea of "God's plan" for your life or exhausted by the achievement treadmill, this book will give you a new way to see everything.

Most books about purpose are just about how to change yourself, not the world. They even argue that you can’t change the world unless you change yourself first. This book is for people who can take on the challenge of doing two things at once. This is for those of us who recognize that everything is interconnected, and changing ourselves and the world happen together.