A Vocation Reminder: Your Family Comes First

Lately, I've been puzzling--again--about how best to balance my vocations of wife and mother with that of teacher and tutor. Then I stumbled across this article in Tabletalk by Gene Edward Veith that discusses how our culture and our families are pitted against each other. You should read all of it (it's not long), but here's a teaser that helped me rethink my professional vocations in light of my familial ones.

Work is set against the family. The Reformers spoke of the “three estates,” the three institutions God established: the family, the church, and the state. We, in turn, have callings — or vocations — in each of these realms, where we are to love and serve our different neighbors and live out our Christian faith. 

When we think of “vocation” today, we often immediately think of the particular work we do. But the word “economics” originally referred to “the management of a household.” For the Reformers, the various callings that constitute economic activity fell under the estate of the family. 

In our work, we make a living for ourselves and our families. Our vocations are not a matter of our own self-fulfillment or self-aggrandizement, but for the sake of our neighbors: the customers we serve and the family-members we are supporting.

But today, work is thought of as being about the self. Our work isolates us rather than brings us into service to our culture and especially to our families. Thus, we often neglect our families in favor of our work. When fathers are so busy at work — or commuting back and forth — that they spend less than five minutes a day with their children, as is common today, their callings are seriously out of whack.

I would add that when wives and mothers spend their energies and time focusing primarily on their professional duties rather than their husbands and children, their callings are seriously out of whack. And while there's no metric that differentiates a professional vocation from being a "well-understood calling" from a "seriously-out-of-whack calling," I think that any professional vocation that isn't intentionally, constantly sidelined as secondary to the needs and support of the family is one that's problematic. And I say intentionally, constantly sidelined because vocations always overlap, and one's job will always, despite the best intentions, intrude on one's life now and then. But when it does, the paid worker--whether husband, wife, father, or mother--needs to remember what is most important.