If I had a dollar for every time I heard that…

Dad always said “never send a man to do a task you feel you are too good to do”. I chafe at being helped doing anything because I look at it as- well, almost sinful- to have someone else do something I look on as my responsibility. And I tend to jump right in and get in the slime with even the most junior of my co-workers, because I never want them to get the impression that they are put upon.

This is because I don’t look on what I do as a job. Jobs are what they have on offer at Walmart and Taco Bell. I also don’t think of it as a career, because “career” has always seemed to be a way of putting lipstick on the pig of “job”.

I think of it as a calling. A directive from the creator to do certain things. People speak of being “Called” to orders- in other words, to be called to the priesthood or the religious life. it was easy to spot the people in seminary who had been genuinely called- they were the ones who were as comfortable and as happy serving mass or leading prayer groups as they were scrubbing urinals or raking leaves.

To someone who has not felt the call, here’s what it’s like: You see someone doing something, or get to know someone, and you have the sensation of a chainsaw opening your breastbone and your heart jumping out in front of you, and yelling at you ‘Do that!!! That’s what you’re supposed to do!!”

People feel the call to differing degrees; I felt it then and I feel it now, and it is a pain that never leaves you once you have felt it. You do the things that ameliorate the pain.

the work I do, most of it, improves people’s lives. Makes their work easier, safer, more productive. When I work on a project, I feel relief, I feel soothed. I know that I have made someone’s life better, possibly many someones. Most of the time I see the direct result of my actions, sometimes I do not.

The Calling is like a heroin addiction, it’s a monkey that must be satisfied regularly. You tend to gravitate toward others like yourself, and you tend to do things others wouldn’t, for reasons most don’t understand.

The Calling ignores things like income and living and working conditions in exchange for gratification, and nobody who has the Calling and heeds it is a member of a union.

You see it very often in places like veterinary medicine. Sometimes even in medicine proper.Edited to add, because I’m shamed I didn’t mention it the first time, the men and women in our armed services. Thanks, NFO. It is less common in places like teaching and in different ministries than it ought to be. A volunteer fireman pretty much defines it, because in most cases, in small towns and rural areas, a fireman is a guy who will get out of his warm bed and suit up and stagger out into freezing cold to extinguish the fire at the home of someone who might be his worst enemy, and do it for no pay.

The Calling is as often a curse as it is a blessing, because it can separate families from one another and cause no end of personal difficulties. Few people get it, and those who are called don’t care.