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Hello, fellow wayfarers … How you can prepare now for the way work is about to be upended … Why some new poems from Wendell Berry moved me … What Jen Wilkin taught me this week about teaching the Bible … The little drummer boy shows up on a desert island … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically
You don’t have to seek God’s will for your career anymore.
I’m mostly joking, but not entirely. We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about to change dramatically. It’s not God or his will that’s changing but the world as we’ve known it—and with it, the outmoded way we’ve thought about “career.”
My teenage years brought with them a series of decisions as I wrestled with “What am I going to do with my life?” and “What is God’s will for me?” As with most of us, a huge part of that was calling. For me, it was a calling to ministry. But as many of us have emphasized and reemphasized for the past 30 years, a calling is not just into full-time Christian service but more generally to a vocation. The stakes of figuring out precisely what that calling was were rather fraught because it determined a cascade of other questions: Should you go to college or trade school or enlist in the military or do something else? If college, what major? If trade school, what discipline? If the military, what branch?
Those decisions determined the scope of your life—even if you pivoted and chose something else later. You felt that that if you got this wrong, you would be wasting your life or ruining your future. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a 17- or 18-year-old. That was the world all of us lived in, as did our parents and our grandparents. But we’re entering a different world now.
Last week, the essay “Something Big Is Happening” hit 60 million views on X within a matter of days and just as quickly became a focus of controversy. The essay, by artificial intelligence industry researcher Matt Shumer, argues that we are in the equivalent of February 2020, paying little attention to the virus that news reports told us was spreading across China. The world, Shumer wrote, is about to change dramatically—with a sea change of job losses and mass unemployment, especially in entry-level positions and among white-collar “knowledge workers.”
Many dismissed Shumer as an alarmist “doomer” or found legitimate problems with some of his predictions. But let’s set all that aside. What should get our attention is not what’s contested in Schumer’s piece but what is not. Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, recently wrote a memo warning the world about what’s coming, including, as Axios summarized after interviewing him, his belief that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years.”
Note that this is not Paul Kingsnorth or another tech skeptic. This is someone who has articulated one of the most hopeful views of the possibilities of AI for a better future for all of us—and even wrote a manifesto called “Machines of Loving Grace.” Amodei still believes in the promise of AI—after all, he’s in charge of one of the most important AI companies in the world. In an interview with Ross Douthat, Amodei explored even more in depth what he sees coming. It’s worth it in the long run, he believes, but the upheaval will be massive.
At the same time, an Anthropic safety researcher published an open letter telling the world he was quitting—and heading to the United Kingdom to write poetry. The letter did not end with “Good night, and good luck,” but that was the feel.
As you know, I have definite views about where I think this is headed, and I have stated and restated my alarm that the church (and Christian ministries and media) seem unwilling or unable to prepare. But here’s one piece of all the ways AI is changing the world that will definitely be the case, regardless of whether the AI doomers, the AI boosters, or those of us in the middle are right: The old pattern of choosing a career and spending a life pursuing it is about to be over.
In some ways, of course, it already is. My father worked for essentially two places for his entire life—the FBI and the Ford Motor Company—and he had a more varied career than many of his peers, who started at a company and retired in the same place. That has shifted. Virtually no one expects a career so stable that they’ll be with the same employer for a lifetime. But most people thought that even if employment is not that stable anymore, a sense of vocation still is and always will be. If you are a computer programmer, you might go from working at a hospital to working at a law firm. If you’re an accountant, you might go from working for a paper company to working at a county parks-and-recreation department, and so on.
Things are much less fixed and stable now—even for the most educated and specialized. After all, a surgeon in 2026 might well have an unrecognizable skill set when compared to a surgeon in 2046. An effective teacher in 2026 might need the equivalent of an entirely different education to do the job in 2056. And then there are those whose entire fields get raptured in what seems like the twinkling of an eye.
There are lots of dangers, toils, and snares here, and I won’t wave them away. But there’s at least one way in which the shakeup we’re entering might be good for you. I don’t mean good in the sense that medicine or quality of life will be better (although I have no reason to doubt that). I mean the uncertainty itself. Our own uncertainty can help us shake off some assumptions that hurt us.
We have thought of vocation as a definite thing. That mindset may even be behind a lot of the angst we have about discerning God’s will for a career. We think once it’s decided, then the map is set, and now we just set out on it. Of course, that was never really true. Vocations never go the way we plan. That’s true whether a person stays in the same role for a lifetime or moves from job to job to job.
A truck driver might do the same thing he did when he was 25, but it’s an entirely different thing to maintain attention and skill than it was to choose it. Someone might think she knows what it will be like to be an emergency room doctor after interviewing those who’ve done it, but she doesn’t know what it’s like to be an emergency room doctor while going through a divorce or recovering from an addiction.
As Frederick Buechner famously said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That’s still true. But the ways and means of joining your gladness to that hunger will change—probably over and over. The unpredictability was always there. Now it’s just recognizable and undisguised.
Maybe you’re worried about figuring out what God is calling you to do. Maybe you’re concerned about how long you can keep working in the calling you chose years ago. In either case, here’s the good news: You can do nothing about the changes around you, but you can do something about you.
Here’s what I mean. Maybe you write code and your job is about to be replaced by an AI model created by another AI model. But you will still be the kind of person who knows how to pay attention to the detail it takes to do what you do, who knows how to discipline yourself to focus on the task in front of you. You still are the person who could do all that while facing all the personal obstacles in front of you at the time.
Maybe those skills will be completely repurposed in ways you never imagined, but you still have them. Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of yourself as a software engineer and to start thinking of yourself as a person who has the kind of mind that can learn and do software engineering—even if you apply it to something you never imagined. You can teach someone else how to do that—even if it is so they can do things you never even considered.
I’m right there with you. AI models can write faster than I can, and I’m sure they can turn out a more attention-grabbing article or sermon than mine would be. Maybe the whole point of my calling wasn’t the writing or the teaching but the preparation for some month in the distant future when my roommate in the nursing home tells me he was hurt by some religion and is scared to die. Maybe my whole calling—all these years of grappling with what to say in sermons or wrestling every week with whether some atrocity in the news cycle was worth writing about here—maybe that was all just a lifetime of preparation for me to be able to know what I need to say to him: “Jesus loves you. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Who’s to say? If that is the case, could I live with that? Would it all be worth it? Yes. The same is true for you, whatever you do.
But that contentment requires a certain mindset. In describing Abraham’s faith in response to God’s calling, the Bible says, “And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb. 11:8, ESV throughout). That required Abraham and Sarah and all the other heirs of that promise to “[acknowledge] that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (v. 13). You don’t know what you will be doing in ten years. You never did.
You can’t predict with certainty what jobs the world will need in ten years—and you certainly can’t find one and freeze it in place. But the world will still need wisdom and integrity and creativity and care. As you learn and practice a craft, you can pay attention to what disciplines that you have enable you to do it. Those who thrive will be those who adapt—who can learn, recalibrate, and see their vocations as lives of serving others with their gifts, not just as job descriptions. Maybe then we can free ourselves of identifying with our callings and see that they were always meant to free us to give and serve.
And in that freedom, we might recover something we’ve lost. Jesus said to his disciples, “Follow me.” And then he said it again. And again. And again. In every case, he repurposed old skills for some new task for which his disciples never even knew they were being prepared. Jesus’ calling to vocation was never about a blueprint. It was always about a way. It was never about your calling. It is about who is calling you.
Some New Poems by Wendell Berry
The most recent issue of Plough includes six new poems by Wendell Berry. Most of them are about, as one would expect from a poet over 90 years old, as Berry puts it, the thinning “partition” between “this world and the world to come, or the next or the other world.”
In these poems are all the familiar themes of love for community, family, and land, but there’s a realization that all of these, while not permanent, are held by one who is.
Berry still knows how to kindle some prophetic fire. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.
Jen Wilkin and I Take Questions on Teaching the Bible
Last Friday in a subscribers-only chat, I took readers’ questions for Jen Wilkin about teaching the Bible. I loved every minute. The questions were amazing: “What do you do if you teach a Bible study and people just stare back at you in silence?” “How do you do Bible study if your church is only 30 or 40 people?” “How do I know if I ought to just study the Bible on my own or teach it?”
And, of course, Jen Wilkin came as the full Jen Wilkin—so it was rich, deep, and fun. I came up with so many ideas that I had to delay my next meeting just to write them all down.
If you’d like to learn how to study the Bible better, whether on your own or with others, you will want to listen to this. You can do so here.
I also learned that I love questions coming in during the conversation, and I am trying to figure out how to make that work on my own show.
I made the recording accessible to everybody, but we’ll be doing these interviews periodically only for CT subscribers. Sign up here for a subscription, and you can be part of it. We’ll let you know when the next one is.
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Desert Island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Carrie McFarland from Houston, Texas. Here’s her list:
- “The Rush (Pt. 1–3)” by Kings Kaleidoscope: These are technically three songs, but they function as a cohesive opus when played in order. Kings Kaleidoscope has an incredible way of connecting the grief in my forgetful soul with the magnificent glory of the God who remembers me. The lyrics arrest my cynicism, and the music accesses a childlike joy.
- “Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell: Something about the swelling strings mixed with this blue-collar man in love is simply gorgeous. Bob Dylan reportedly called it “the greatest song ever written.”
- “Death in His Grave” by John Mark McMillan: Many people know John Mark McMillan for songs like “How He Loves” or “King of My Heart.” Those are wonderful, but his catalog is often overlooked. “Death in His Grave” is a modern hymn that declares the gospel story, sung with an intensity the lyrics deserve—something I rarely hear in modern Christian music.
- “There Will Be Time” by Mumford & Sons and Baaba Maal: When I recognize what I can only describe as a dizzy mental panting, I have to tell myself, “There will be time.” Suddenly, this song is in my head, carrying an Ecclesiastes-like reminder: “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
- “Liz on Top of the World” from the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack: If you are a hopeless romantic like me, need I say more? I walked down the aisle to this song, complete with meticulous instructions for the doors to open at the crescendo—making it no surprise to anyone why I was voted “most dramatic” in high school.
- “Danny’s Song” by Loggins and Messina: I love that this song was a gift from Kenny Loggins to his brother Danny after the birth of his son. There’s a humility to it that feels like a rejection of consumerism and entitlement—something I find often in 1970s folk rock.
- “Little Drummer Boy” by Leslie Odom Jr. and the Mzansi Youth Choir: The song we should all have a pass to listen to year-round, and this version makes me dance and smile from ear to ear.
Thank you, Carrie!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“A man receives only what he is ready to receive. … We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
—Henry David Thoreau, from his journal in 1860
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Allen Levi, Theo of Golden (Atria)
- Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars, trans. Tom Holland (Penguin)
- Samuel Scheffler, One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment (Oxford University Press)
- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Mariner)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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