Vocational Poem

A woman in our church, Emma Vanhoozer wrote the following poem – Elementary Principles – for a recent worship service as we worked through the book of Galatians.  I thought it showed an astute understanding of vocation as primarily “a call to relationship with the God of the Universe.”   Here it is… Enjoy!

Elementary Principles

If you called me
To a job, something
Constructive, like building
An ark, or marching
Through a sea of salt, or scrubbing
Crusted blood from Temple court-
Yard cracks where it spilled, or maintaining
Fiberglass installation
Between the sanctity – the Fear –
And the sacrilege of drawing near
(Invisible thorns
Of glass that lodge inside
The lung) guard
The slim yard
You cannot
Cross –

If you called me
To a job, somehow
I think I could bear it, perhaps
Succeed, or earn
My keep, at the least
Perish, but own responsibility.

Yet,
You have called me
To a person
And the only responsibility
– Terrible mercy – is to be
Me (sacrilege)
And free.

To ride on the ark
Of the covenant, walk
On the Galilean Sea, drink
The flowing sacrificial blood, cross
Through the fiberglass shards into
The Holy of Holies.

Yes,
You have called me
To bear cosmic unemployment
My only work to wait for you
Waiting eternally upon me.