One of the most positive transitions you can make is from viewing your work as a job to viewing it as a calling. A job is an exchange of energy in which you do a material task and someone provides money in exchange. A calling, however, is an organic field of energy that emerges from the deepest aspects of who you are. It is the fulfillment of what God has created you to be and do. Approaching your work as a job versus approaching it as a calling makes all the difference in whether or not you dwell in the miraculous universe.
You have a calling simply because you are alive. You have a calling because you are a child of God. You have a calling because you’re on this earth with a divine purpose: to rise to the level of your highest creative possibility, expressing all that you are intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and physically in order to make the universe a more beautiful place.
As you do this, your entire life becomes your ministry—a way to serve God and to serve the world.
The best way to summon your true calling is to put yourself in service to God.
If you’re thinking of money only as something you get in exchange for doing a job, then you’ll never be free of limited thought forms surrounding money. We are heir to the laws that rule the world we identify with. If you identify only with the material plane, you place yourself at the effect of pretty severe economic realities of scarcity and lack. If you identify with the spiritual plane, you’re under no laws but God’s.
“I’m looking for a job,” “I’m trying to figure out what I should do,” and “I don’t know how I’m going to make ends meet” are sentences that confuse the universe. A child of God doesn’t have to “look for a job”; a child of God doesn’t have to “figure out what to do”; a child of God doesn’t have to worry about “how ends will meet.” A child of God is simply a magnet for all things good. The you who thinks of life as a struggle, or a place where you’re on your own, is not the real you. The real you already has a God-given function, and the universe is set up to support it.
The best way to summon your true calling is to put yourself in service to God. The following daily prayer is from A Course in Miracles: “Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say, and to whom?”
While a job is separate from the rest of our lives, a calling is a fulfillment of the rest of our lives. By striving to be the best we can be, we create the internal blueprint by which we do the best we can do. On a soul level, we want to work, we want to create, we want to be productive and serve others and share our gifts with the world.
Often it is not external forms of obstruction that hold us back, but rather internal ones. And nothing releases us internally more than the desire and the willingness to serve.
The world can give you a job, and a job can be taken away. But a true calling puts you in a career zone that cannot be taken away. It reflects your willingness to do what you feel inwardly led to do in order to help heal the world. The universe then registers your true substance, your true seriousness, and your true purpose.
Some things you do will bring forth worldly wealth; other things you do will not directly bring forth wealth at all, but—being the right things to do—will summon wealth miraculously from other sources.
Losing a job does not mean losing your calling, because as a personal ambassador of God, you have been given a permanent assignment. You are here to represent Him who sent you, and He does not change His mind about you. You are never unemployed by God. And that’s true not just about you; it’s true about all of us.
Anything that appears to separate us from each other is not the deepest level of our identity. We all have different jobs, but the same ministry. Some of us are technicians, some of us are mathematicians, some of us are writers and artists, some of us are salespeople, some of us don’t even work as work is defined by the world—but our value, individually, is determined not by what we do but by the consciousness with which we do it.
We’re all here to be available channels for the love that heals all things. A job takes a form, but our ministry is content. Even if you lose your job, you still have your ministry, because it is part of who you are. Your life has no less value if you’re not employed as the world defines it. If you’re kind to people, if you’re compassionate, if you pour your excellence into whatever you’re doing, then you’re doing the job God sent you to do. From that will emerge the next form that’s needed to host the energies you’re bringing forth.
Does that mean you don’t have to “look for a job” as the world defines it? Of course you do! But you do it with a different consciousness. You don’t show up for a job interview thinking, “How do I impress them? I really need this job.” Rather, your process goes more like this:
1. You place your need for work in God’s hands.
Surrendering a situation to God means surrendering your thoughts about it. You’re programming your mind to think thoughts that are the most creative, positive, insightful, and beneficial. You’re not giving up responsibility or turning your power over to something outside yourself; you’re taking the highest responsibility for your circumstances, asking God to make your mind a literal touchstone for miraculous breakthroughs. You walk forward in confidence that God provides.
2. While alert to every opportunity that presents itself, you put enthusiastic energy into brainstorming and creating new possibilities.
You remember that the universe is infinitely abundant, like an orchard filled with fruit that’s just for you. But if you’re hungry, you can’t simply look at an orchard from the side of the road! The universe brought you the orchard; you yourself have to pick the fruit. You are willing to meet opportunity with positivity and faith.
3. You pray and meditate, asking for internal guidance as to whom to call, what to do, and so forth.
When you meditate and pray, you literally emit different brain waves. You receive impulses of insight and creativity that do not flow easily into an anxious mind. You enter the internal temple, the engine room from which you generate the probabilities of success. “I’m too anxious to meditate” is one of the most self-sabotaging things we can say. When we meditate, we stop being anxious.
4. You realize that you can’t know what or where your next job should be.
You trust that there is a perfect plan for the unfolding of your highest good, which your rational mind cannot formulate. God’s plan works, and yours doesn’t. You cannot know how your part fits best into a larger plan for the healing of the world, but God does. Your job is merely to open your mind and open your heart so that a higher consciousness can then flow through you.
5. Before you go to a job interview, audition, or meeting, you blast every person you’re going to be with—and the situation itself—with light and love.
Your goal becomes simply giving and receiving love—which is another way of saying, “May God’s will be done.” You see every interaction as a holy encounter. You intend for this and every situation to be one in which you express your truest, most brilliant, most loving self—and what happens beyond that, you leave to the intelligence of the universe. You’re not going to the interview to try to get a job; you’re going there to do your job!
Those five steps might seem as if they are just little things—hardly the operating principles that move the universe. Yet that is exactly what they are.
ON THE SPIRITUAL plane, you have no competitors. There is no competition for your position, as you are a unique expression of the Mind of God. You not only have a place in the universe; you have an essential function in the universe. Only you can do the job of being you, and the universe itself is left incomplete without you. It is not arrogant but humble to realize this, as you place yourself in service to the greatest drama there is: the actualization of your own potential.
Your highest function is simply to be the person you are capable of being, and from that effort—the development of your kindness and positivity, your vulnerability and availability to life—your calling will emerge.
As you become who you are meant to be, what you are meant to do will fall like a path of rose petals before you. You may be thinking, “I don’t know what my calling is,” but God does. He knows how your talents and abilities can best fit into His plan for the enlightenment and healing of all things. What talents you have, He will glorify as you use them to glorify Him. And talents you don’t even know that you have, that lie latent within you, will emerge as you surrender more deeply to love.
Your calling is what you would do whether you were paid to do it or not. Your calling is what you have to do in order to be happy. Your calling is what connects you to your deepest self, and to the rest of life around you. If you have no idea what that would be, simply pray, “Dear God, please use me,” and awareness of your calling will appear miraculously.
From the time she was a little girl, my daughter was entranced by stories of historical kings and queens. Constantly she would say to me, “Mommy, tell me a queen story.” Even when very young, she would read books about King Henry VIII and his wives, following me around the house telling me about this or that historical incident. Now she’s a graduate student in history. While some have suggested to me that finding a job as a history professor might not be easy once she graduates, I never worry that she won’t be able to make a living as a historian, because history isn’t just a job to her. History is her calling. She is genuinely excited about it. Whether she pursues her love of history as a professor or writer, or shares her knowledge via some other means, her passion will undoubtedly make her of use to the world. I have no doubt that in the miraculous universe, she will be compensated appropriately for the work she does.
I’m always sad to hear parents saying to their child, “But how will you make a living doing that?” when their child is obviously passionate about something. Reading the biography of Steve Jobs, anyone can see that this kid with a love of computers, working away in his parents’ garage, wasn’t thinking just about how he would get a job. He was responding to a higher calling—a calling for the ages, as it turned out—and no one doubts the abundance that he created. Not all of us have the talent of a computer genius, but all of us have a call to greatness nonetheless.
The true you, your holy self, is beyond any limits of the mortal world. So are the talents and brilliance within you. When you dwell in that knowledge, simply recognizing and appreciating the divine spirit residing in all of us, you receive the charisma of a self-confident person.
Someone who has confidence in God comes across as confident to the world; someone who thinks of him- or herself as a follower of God comes across as a leader to the world. You’ll develop a kind of invisible light, a sense of humble certitude, a greatness that comes from beyond yourself. Your abilities, your intelligence, your talents, your personality, your circumstances, your dreams will all come together in a beautiful pattern. And you will see all this as your calling—a calling back and forth, in continuous song, from your heart to the universe and the universe back to you.
In the words of Confucius, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”