Things I Probably Won’t Ever Have the Chance to Teach at Youth Group

Part I: CAREer

by Elanor

A couple weeks ago, Mr. Fu, one of the youth counselors, gave a message on finding your career from God’s point of view. He gave a great presentation of the reality of things: of how you don’t have to be so stressed out over finding the “right” career, because, unlike the educational system likes to brainwash students into believing, if you realize you’re doing the wrong thing, you can go do something else. It just takes trust in God’s provision and the willingness to admit you were wrong.

But the best part of his presentation was inadvertent. During his introductory game, Mr. Fu put the word career on the overhead as I have reproduced it in the title. Seeing the mixture of capital and lowercase letters made me immediately think of a brilliantly cheesy lesson about finding your career that no one would ever be able to forget:

Don’t try to find a career. Become a CAREer.

After everyone is done groaning and rolling their eyes (me absolutely included if I were a member of the audience), I would hopefully be able to explain the transformative nature of this idea.

God is passionate about people. He cares about knowing them, about making them the best they can be, and about bringing them into a relationship with Him so that they can become the best they can be. When we go out and try to find a career, we use these questions to figure out what we should do: What do I like doing? What am I good at? What will give me financial security? Where can I make a name for myself?

All of these questions focus the issue on the action I will be performing as my job: building circuit boards, conveying information to high school students, screwing toothpaste caps on toothpaste tubes. The people involved in your occupation are seen only as part of the job atmosphere.

But what if, instead of finding a career I can live with, I try to use my life to become something: I try to become someone who cares. The focus of my job entirely changes. The people become central, instead of the action. In the past six months, I’ve met a couple young women who decided to become nurses, and I think they exemplify this new focus extremely well. The action of changing bandages and cleaning bedpans is not at all appealing—it is basically janitorial work. But they do their jobs in order to care for the people who are sick and need their help.

This is not to say we should all become nurses or teachers. I believe that, no matter what occupation we decide to pursue, there is a chance for us to focus, not on the action of our jobs, but the people we interact with. God wants to change us so that we care about the same things as He does, about the eternal things. My daily exchanges with cashiers, flight attendants, and random people on the street are more eternally significant than performing at my job: my job lasts only as long as I live; the irritable lady in the airport checking in my luggage is everlasting.