Nowadays, it may be a word that is familiar to most people, but in the late 40s you never heard the word “vocation”.
One Monday morning, after walking about one‑and‑a‑half miles to school, unless some farmer passed you with his horses and wagon (no school buses in those days), the teacher asked all of us present to write an essay. After getting our pencil and paper out she said, “I want you to write an essay entitled your ‘Vocation in Life’.” Four or five of us, I, being one, put our hands up and she said, “What do you want?”, and we said, “We don’t know what that word means.” She explained that vocation means what are you going to do with your life when you are finished school. At that time it looked like some of us would always be in school so we didn’t have to worry about a vocation!
After listening to her and looking at our blank paper, four or five of us again, mine included, put our hands up. The teacher apparently had had a bad weekend, and this is what we would call a blue Monday. She said, “What now?”. We said, “Now that you told us what the word means, we don’t know what we want to be.” She threw her hands up in the air and I think she wondered when it came to a vocation in life, why did I choose to be a teacher, these students are hopeless. With a disgusted voice she said, “Oh, write about anything!”
I wrote that I was going to be a farmer. That was what my father was, and until the age of eighteen I worked on a farm. At eighteen, I moved to Ontario, never to farm again. Since that day, I have never milked a cow or harnessed or drove a horse.
From that small school in Belmont, Nova Scotia, among those who had never heard the word “vocation”, came doctors, nurses, clergymen, and government workers, just to name a few.
Myself? I never graduated from high school but was able to spend three years and graduate from Bible College and also completed some courses at Acadia Divinity College, and in 1983, I had the privilege of speaking at my son, Mark’s, Baccalaureate service when he graduated from High School in Hartland, N.B. United Baptist Church. My topic — you guessed it — “Your Vocation in Life”.
Leslie Jobb