Doing good work: an excerpt from the book Visions of Vocation

Last updated on: November 12, 2014 at 5:54 pm by Dr. Steven Garber

Doing good work: an excerpt from the book Visions of Vocation 2014-10-20T18:10:50-05:00 Dr. Steven Garber

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This excerpt from Steve Garber’s book Visions of Vocation is reprinted here with the kind permission of InterVarsity Press. Stay tuned as we continue to occasionally publish excerpts from the book here at Visions of Vocation the blog. And get the book from IVP at this link!

[Steve writes about some of his friends:] In the relationships and responsibilities of common life, they see themselves as implicated in the way the world is and ought to be. They see themselves as having vocations that call them into life, into the world—into a way of knowing that implicates them, for love’s sake. And in the unfolding of my life, living where I have lived, working where I have worked, I have met some of those people.

My first memories of Jonathan are from Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado, where he came for a summer after his first year at the University of Kansas. A native of Lawrence and the son of generations of Kansans, he loved being from the people and place that made him him. But as I got to know Jonathan, I also saw an unusual eagerness, a seriousness about things that matter and a softness of heart that led to a rare desire to learn all that he could.

That summer , with students like him from all over the middle part of America, he took up the calling to live between two worlds— in the rich image of John Stott—deepening and growing an intellectually grounded understanding of the Christian tradition and developing categories and lenses to make sense of the world around him. Over time he became a part of our family, eating meals with us, playing with our children, even helping us to bury a badly broken and now dead new puppy. His educational interests eventually took him to other places, where he met Jennifer, and before long they were married on Lookout Mountain, straddling the states of Tennessee and Georgia. More schooling followed for both of them, and they moved first to Mississippi and then to Iowa, where they began having children.

1452851742_c3f2290392_z In school and yet needing to provide for his young family, Jonathan would day after day leave his books to take up the craft of carpentry, apprenticing himself to a skilled craftsman who trained him in the hammering of nails and the sawing of wood. He had always loved working with his hands; in fact, the harder the work, the more he liked it. It was not very long before he decided that he would rather build houses than study history, and they moved back to Kansas, home to Lawrence. I remember smiling when I saw the T-shirt he had made to advertise his new company , “Steward of visions and resources,” and I was sure that he was bringing his years of thinking about the world to bear on the way that he was going to live in the world.

Over the years his commitment to that kind of work has deepened as his children have grown from babies to adults. No longer a young man eager to take up the world, he is now fully at work in the world, a trusted and respected member of the community whose labor of love in building and rebuilding houses is prized by his neighbors. Being in business for himself, he has all of the usual hopes and fears built into his work: ups and downs in the economy, trustworthy and not-so-trustworthy employees, the daily reality of his reputation on the line.

Listening in over the years I know that Jonathan and Jennifer care deeply about both their local community and the wider world. It would be fair to say that they have made peace with living in Lawrence. They live in the tension of knowing that there is a lot of complex brokenness everywhere, and they often wonder about their responsibility. Sometimes that does take them to other places, to bigger cities, giving away their gifts for the sake of others, he in carpentry and she in counseling, while still living in Lawrence as they do, enjoying the graces of a small university town that still has a wonderful main street, where it is possible to know and to be known.

In a place like Lawrence, it is not possible to say one thing and then do another and still keep your head up the next day. The person you mistreated by doing bad work on his new kitchen may be your daughter’s soccer coach or be married to your son’s high school teacher. To have your vocation be embodied where other people live, in their bedrooms and bathrooms, in their longed-for new decks, more often than not requires a commitment to a common good that is more lived than it is imagined. It is a simple grace, really, to be trustworthy, to be known as someone who does good work and who will stand by his work.

Image: Roberto La Forgia, “The Way.”

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