Many are called, many are chosen.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something. Henry David Thoreau

Living on a farm requires everyone in the farm family to work. As a child, it was expected of me to help with the garden planting, hoeing, picking and preserving. When it was hay season, I was on the trailer stacking bales and helping to transfer those same bales to the pole barn for storage. When a new pasture was needed, my sister and I spent five of our Saturdays sprigging and watering grass with our father. Driving the tractor while my dad peeled hay off the roll for the cows, washing the clothes and hanging them out on the line in the backyard, learning how to shoot a rifle so I could kill a rattlesnake (we lived on a farm that had previously been named Rattlesnake Hill for good reason), bucket feeding orphaned calves twice a day, feeding and watering the chickens were a part of my daily life as a child in the rural South. When my mother went to work outside the home when I was nine, daddy gave my sister and me two cooking lessons... how to make vegetable soup and how to cut up a chicken (you could only buy whole chickens back in the dark ages). After that, we were on our own and required to help start supper for mama before she got home. Often we had the meal ready by the time she arrived. This work was in addition to the usual chores... make your bed, clean your room, practice your piano, do your homework, help with the housework on Saturday mornings, iron clothes. Children in all the families I knew were good for something besides just being.
Barbara Brown Taylor in her book An Altar in the World lists all the jobs she has had and all the jobs she hopes to yet have. She chooses to see them as opportunities to learn about herself and connection to other people she would not meet except through that job. Like most of us, she lived with the illusion that God had one overarching most important just right job waiting for us when we grew up.
In my Baptist world, this was referred to as “being called”. A popular folk saying was “Many are called but few are chosen”.Working at the paper mill was o.k. but being called to be a preacher was much higher on the list of godly work. Being a teacher was good work but being a missionary was the pinnacle of sacrificial calling. Listening to Miss Pearl Todd tell of her work as a missionary in China elicited in my twelve year old self an earnest desire to be called to full time Christian service. I claimed that call by walking down the aisle and announcing it to the preacher, Brother Kannon, who promptly told the congregation. In later years my father owned his fear of that call coming true when I married Michael in seminary. He figured God was finally going to get me and send me to “Darkest Africa” far, far away from him and the family.
The truth of the matter is we are all called to and chosen for many different kinds of work in our lives. My daddy worked in a paper mill, his college degree prepared him for a work he chose not to do, in order to buy the farm, work that he loved to do. My mother loved working in the insurance business but was never paid what she was worth. I’ve been a social worker, a paid child care provider, a piano teacher, director of an Information and Referral Service, an office assistant for a fund raising effort, an organist, a picture framer and a teacher in a continuing ed program. None of this work was all of who I was but each job taught me something new about myself.
Most of us have two kinds of work... work we have to do and work we choose to do. Sometimes the work we have to do keeps food on the table and a roof over our heads, the dishes washed and the house cleaned. The work we choose to do keeps our souls fed and sheltered. Even those lucky few who have work that supplies both needs, will find worms in their shiny red work apples. The work we do, both kinds, is a gift we offer to the world not because it makes us somebody but because we are already somebody, a special gift from God to the world.
I mother my children and other young friends as one of my vocations. It is as special to me as the art I create and the classes I teach. The horse poop I scoop and the hay I feed the cows is have to work that offers me an opportunity to rest my spirit in the needs of the present day. Shopping for groceries, washing clothes, cooking supper and mopping the floor become sacramental acts, offerings of grace filled joy because I have been given much. In Ecclesiastes, the preacher says, “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love...all the days of your life which have been given to you under the sun... and in your work at which you work under the sun. Whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.”
And so today, Lord, help me do what needs to be done and what I choose to do with all my might, not from any sense of unworthiness, but in the gladsome assurance that all I do is a gift from you that I am giving back to you. I am a somebody, a whobody, an employee whose paycheck is love, laughter and life. Thank you for all my jobs, great and small.