A VOCATION STORY: The 1981 Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire tells the story of two runners training to represent Great Britain in the 1924 Olympic Games. One of them, Scotsman Eric Liddell, is also training to become a Christian missionary in China. His sister Jennie disapproves of what she judges a distraction from his true calling, and seeks to dissuade Eric. His answer speaks volumes about the nature of a God-given vocation: "Jennie, I believe that God made me for a purpose, for the mission in China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure. Not to run would be to reject his gift, to hold Him in contempt."

Eric Liddell won the gold medal in the 400-meter race in the 1924 Paris Olympics. The next year, he left for the missions in China, where he worked as a teacher and pastor for the next 20 years, competing in the occasional athletic event. In 1945, Eric Liddell died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. In 2008, Chinese authorities revealed that shortly before his death, Eric refused an opportunity to leave the camp in a POW exchange, giving up his place to a pregnant woman. Eric Liddell lived his vocation to the full: he found the place where his deep gladness and the deep hungers of the world intersected, and he embraced it joyfully and generously.

Embracing our mission in life is not an easy task. It is not for the faint of heart. Yet as American poet Annie Dillard reminds us, in her essay “Living Like Weasels”, it is in the end the only real path:

“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft … over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, on eagles’ wings.”

What about you? What is the name by which God has called you? Where do you feel God's pleasure? How have you been gifted, and how are you sharing your gift with the world? Where do your deepest desires and the needs and hungers of your world meet? Pay attention: for this is where you discover your mission in life, your personal vocation, God’s name for you.