At every turn, we hear of career concerns—of career counselors, smart career moves, career-ending injuries, and so on. As much attention as we pay to this notion, indeed, as much anxiety we have over it, we might well be interested in what the Bible has to say about careers.
Alas, concordances aren’t much help since the word “career” is a later development, a metaphor arising in the Romance languages, beginning with the Latin for “road” or “route”—carraria—and showing up in French as carriere. The closest we come in the Greek New Testament is with dromos, which means a course one traverses (as in hippodrome, a building where horses run a course). Dromos appears in 2 Timothy 4:7, where, reflecting on his life, Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race (course in the KJV), I have kept the faith.” And yes, the word is translated as carrera and carreira in Spanish and Portuguese Bibles respectively.
So what career guidance can we get from Paul, who finished his dromos/race/course/carrera? Well, in Acts 22:3, we learn that he got off to a great start, being “thoroughly trained” under the master teacher Gamaliel. But things went off the rails for him when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. With his rabbinic career wrecked, he ventured out on a new career.
So how did this work out for him? Second Corinthians 11:24-28 doesn’t paint a rosy picture—lashings, beatings, a stoning, shipwrecks, toil, hardship, dangers of every sort and on every hand, hunger, thirst, cold, exposure, and worry about the budding churches: not the sort of opportunity you’d post on a job board.
Surely a career counselor could have helped him avoid a lot of this grief, for he seemed a bit too ready to launch out on bold enterprises without careful study of the prospects. For instance, he jumped into Macedonia without knowing who on earth might catch him (Acts 16:9-10)— much like the impulsive Abraham, who “by faith . . . obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8).
Of course, the Bible says things about being prudent, prepared, and diligent for the work ahead, and equipped for options. And certainly, there is room for a holy ambition that dreams of and studies for far-reaching impact for the Kingdom. But unflinching devotion to an economically or socially upward path or to a congenial situation is not the biblical approach. Rather, believers should manifest a level of joyful abandon, willing to discover their God-directed career at the end of it all, saying, in effect with Paul, “Praise the Lord. That was surely interesting.” In other words, everyone has a career, a course in life; it’s a question of authorship. When we write out our plans, we should do so with pencil rather than pen, always willing for God to erase them and substitute fresh ones in ink. The editing may upset us at first, but we should trust His wisdom and beneficence, come what may.
First John 2:15-17 counsels us not to love “the things in the world” and to avoid the desires of the flesh and eyes and the “pride of life.” When career concerns fill in these blanks, then an idol materializes. At its feet, pastors are paralyzed by preoccupation with longevity and promotion, and the laity shrink from witness in the work place for fear that someone will be annoyed.
In Luke 14:28, Jesus asks rhetorically, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” Taken alone, this sounds like a career counselor’s advice, the sort of prompt that would lead a preacher to avoid prickly topics, a baker to make cakes for gay weddings, or a public school teacher to withhold a kind word for Intelligent Design. But the whole passage points in the opposite direction—to the way of the cross (a road quite familiar to Christians in, for instance, the Muslim world). This is, of course, the highest career counseling, in that there could be no better course to take in life than to live daily in response to the Lord’s leading, whatever the cost in worldly terms. Indeed, as the Bible says, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:24).