From our Vacation . . . to our Vocation
During the past few weeks, people have gone back to school and work and jobs after the summer vacation period. The concept of vacation as a time of rest was exemplified by the Creator Himself when He worked for six days and made the seventh day a day of rest.

But some highly blessed people have gone from their vacation rest to work at their vocation.

Two Types of Work
There are two types of work; one is essential work to pay our living expenses. The other is to work at our vocation; the term “calling” in the Bible comes from the Latin root vocalis, meaning “voice, vocal, vocalize, speak, call.” Our vocation or calling is work that God has specifically fitted us to do, work He called us to do. This work goes beyond the “calling we have received to be humble, gentle, patient, loving one another.” Eph 4:1-2.

My Dad’s Example
My dad was an example of both types of work. He was taken out of school at age twelve and made to work in his father’s retail fish butcher shop for fifteen years until he married. He set up his own fish shop and worked there for thirteen years to provide for his growing family.

When I was born, however, Dad showed skill at the vocational work God had gifted him to do. Using simple hand tools, he built some beautiful, long-lasting baby furniture, a crib and a changing table, which served as a chest of drawers for baby clothes. All this woodworking was done expertly and with love and had absolutely nothing to do with butchering and selling fish.

When I was twelve years old, our family emigrated to Canada. Dad worked as a labourer in construction and learned about housebuilding in Canada. He earned his carpentry journeyman’s license, built houses and did renovations. The high quality of his work brought him success since, in his forties, he was finally working in his calling, the type of vocational work for which God had prepared and gifted him. After twenty years, he came to Brazil and built a house for my family, using hardwood lumber he had never seen. That house was so well built that over fifty years later, it still withstands the deteriorating effects of humidity.

How God Prepared Me for My Vocational Work
Looking back over my life, I can see how God readied me and prepared the work He wanted me to do. Decades before I was called the “WordMan,” I was fascinated by words. I learned to read in kindergarten before I started grade one. As I grew up in Holland, I constantly heard two languages: Dutch and Frisian, which my parents and all my relatives spoke. I could read so well in first grade that the teacher thought I had memorized the stories. When she tested me with a book, she knew I had never seen, she was amazed that I could read it fluently.

I loved reading stories and listening to stories being told. When something happened to me during the school day, I could hardly wait to talk about it during the supper hour, to the point my father sometimes told me to stop talking so he could tell my mother what happened to him that day.

In Canada, I learned English, and within a year, I knew enough English to volunteer to tell a story very successfully in front of the class. I had no fear of public speaking and loved writing stories and letters.

The Results of Working in God’s Calling
God was clearly calling me to vocational work with words: learning another language, speaking in public and writing for publication, and it is no accident that Jo and I ended up in Brazil, where I learned my third and fourth language and where we worked for over two decades to translate God’s Word into Canela. This was followed by another thirty-five years of speaking at hundreds of recruiting and fund-raising events and the writing and publishing of five books of collected blog posts and four memoirs, the last of which is being published this fall.