The Two Paths

When I think about vocation – what to do with my life – I find myself compelled by two paths that seem to lead in quite different directions.

I’ll call one path the way of service. This is a school of thought that seems to be especially common in more missional and activist spaces and seems to set most comfortably with more utilitarian or reformed worldviews. The heartbeat of the way of service is that the purpose of my life is to give myself away, laying down my ambitions and sacrificing my pleasure for the good of others. Popular slogans for this way of approaching vocation often sound like they come from a gym or a battlefield, include things like: ‘Don’t waste your life,’ ‘Do all the good you can,’ ‘Fight the good fight,’ ‘Spend yourself on behalf of the hungry,’ ‘Push right to your limits,’ ‘Leave nothing on the field.’ It’s a path that might lead people to incarnational mission in a rough area or working a particularly demanding job or practicing radical simplicity in order to give generously.

The other path is the way of wholeness. This is a school of thought that is perhaps best exemplified by the likes of Wendell Berry and Eugene Peterson and is more popularly championed by a lot of the books about rest, self-care and emotional health that have come out in the last decade or two (many of which seem to be reactions against some of the more extreme aspects of the way of service). The way of wholeness is all about integrity and character-formation. It cares more about being than doing. It values rest, limits, creativity, art and beauty. On the way of wholeness, it is ok for something to be a good in itself – not everything needs to be a means to an end. It is a path that leads people to value family life over their careers or local neighbourhoods over upward mobility or slowness and fullness over speed and achievement.  

On the surface, these feel like divergent paths pulling in very different directions. And that’s what I find difficult, because though there are some very attractive parts to both paths, there are also significant dangers.  

I love the other-centredness, the sense of purpose and the missional drive in the way of service. I want my life to count, I want to serve others like Jesus does and that means that there will be cost and suffering. But I also recognise dangers in the way of service – dangers of scraping through life stressed, joyless and frantically busy, dangers of indulging messiah complexes or creating dependencies, dangers of baptising a thoroughly secular workaholism and addiction to results, dangers of neglecting my own health and formation, dangers of hurting those I love in the name of serving God.

And on the other hand, I love the depth and the slowness of the way of wholeness. I love the value it places on being, not just doing. I love the space it creates for character formation and rest and beauty. I love the respect it has for humans as whole beings. I want to live a life that is full, and thriving, and sustainable. I want to grow into a disciple of maturity, peace and joy. But I also recognise dangers in the way of wholeness – dangers of mistaking self-care for self-absorption, dangers of slowly drifting into a comfortable life of consumption and middle-class affluence, dangers of opting out of anything that might be costly or hard, dangers of unrealised potential, dangers of living a life that is closed in on itself and withdrawn from the world.

Both paths are good. Both pick up on clear traditions within scripture and throughout church history. But either path, pursued in isolation, is problematic.   

And so surely the answer is some sort of creative tension – a third path – one which keeps both paths within sight but refuses to veer too far towards one at the cost of losing track with the other.

It’s one thing to identify that tension in theory. But I am entering a stage of life now where suddenly there are quite a few big decisions to be made. I want to live on purpose – by design not by default. But that is hard when the path you want to take is the tricky way of tension and negotiation rather than the superficially frictionless paths of either extreme.

It’s good to know that we are not on our own. It’s good to know that there are others who have held this tension before us, who have lived lives where service and wholeness harmonise and reinforce each other. That certainly helps. And whilst there are big decisions that feel far too ‘adult’ for me to make, I have a suspicion that the actual business of holding the tension of service and wholeness will happen primarily in the day-to-day, in the mundane, in the small things. That removes some of the fear from those big decisions. It also brings all of this down from the future and the theoretical level to the more immediate and tangible, more containable level of who I am choosing to become today. That’s where we carve out this third path – that’s where the adventure is.