Quotes about Vocation

The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.

Think hard before you do this," one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. "Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you can reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.

Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me - a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.

The cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in the Lord's vineyard.

I really enjoy working. It doesn't tire me.

Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade—not outside it. Whatever we are called to "do" is not a "job" but a sacred vocation.

In the potent words of Dorothy Sayers, our vocation is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Let your life speak.

As Tom Wright describes it, Mary's Song is the "gospel before the gospel" and it "goes with a swing and a clap and a stamp." Mary's Song is an expression of gratitude for God morphing her bad reputation into a messianic vocation. But her past is even more than this unfortunate label.

even Jesus was resurrected with his wounds." I like that: we, too, are raised to a vocation with the wounds of our past intact, visible, and a witness to what God can do.

Every Man owes some of his time to the upbuilding of the profession to which he belongs.

It is impossible for one man both to labor day and night to get a living, and at the same time give himself to the study of sacred learning as the preaching office requires.