A Quote by Thomas Merton

Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice ?out there? calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice ?in here? calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already posses.
Once I asked my counsellor for advice about my vocation. I asked, 'How can I know if God is calling me and for what he is calling me?' He answered, 'You will know by your happiness. If you are happy with the idea that God calls you to serve him and your neighbour, this will be the proof of your vocation.'
It is not what I do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through me. God does not want worldly successes, He wants me. He wants my heart in submission to Him. Life is not just a few years to spend on self indulgence and career advancement. It is a privilege, a responsibility, a stewardship to be lived according to a much higher calling, God's calling. This alone gives true meaning to life.
Any praise I receive does not change me, for I pass it right along to God. I walk because God gives me strength to walk, I live because God gives me the supply to live, I speak because God gives me the words to speak. All I did was to surrender my will to God's will. My entire life has prepared me for this undertaking. This is my calling. This is my vocation. This is what I must be doing. I could not be happy doing anything else.
A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.
Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
I think when I started going to war zones and started covering humanitarian issues, it became a calling because I realized I had a voice, and I can give people without a voice a voice... and now it is something that sits inside of me every day.
I still don't know if I'm good enough or if it's a calling or a vocation or something, but the talent part is out. My desire to do it is undoubted. I just love doing this.
I don't speak out because I am an actor nor will I keep silent because I am an actor. I respect my profession, but it endows me with no special privileges; but it also does not limit me or muzzle me. I am a person and a citizen with the attendant responsibilities of voice and vote.
I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.
I understood now. This voice, the one that had been trying to get my attention all this time, calling out to me, begging me to hear it - it wasn't Will's. It was mine.
If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.
How does God teach me love? By putting me around unlovely people. How does God teach me joy in the middle of grief? Not happiness, which is based on happenings. How does God teach me peace? Not when I am out fishing and everything is going my way and it doesn't get better than this. But in the middle of chaos. How does God teach me patience? By putting me in His waiting room.
Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.
I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer to give a voice to his community. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you're not writing, when your writing's not dealing with a concrete political situation.
I listened to that voice inside me-... Everyone has an inner voice; you just have to listen to it and trust it in order to be led by it. I did that, and it gave me the ability to live a life that's true to who I am and what I really wanted.
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