By David Williamson.
After dinner at my daughter’s house on Father’s Day, my daughter handed me a cup with the familiar inscription: “Do What You Love, Love what you Do.” It pushed me to remember my dad’s work history as a metallurgist. Metallurgy is the forming of steel tools from raw steel sheets. My dad was a foundry superintendent for Minneapolis Moline, the farm-implement company that manufactured important farm machines through the 70s and 80s.
He did not have the opportunity to search and select his career field. It was determined by where he lived and what work was available in that town. He did what was available and learned to love it and be highly skilled at it.
Years later, in my own vocational quest, I found the SIMA program (System for Identifying Motivated Abilities). I did a careful analysis of my interests and (slightly!) demonstrated skills or interests. I learned to do what I loved doing and had at least some demonstrated skill at doing.
I think my dad came to see his work as a calling, though he would never phrase it that way. I think he was a very skilled and knowledgeable metallurgist, but it was in the process of supervising the foundry of the company that it became calling for him. His basic personality surfaced and shone.
My dad had a love for numbers, and in his free time would work out arithmetic problems that he would create. (This was in the pre-Sudoku days!) He obviously loved the mathematical, tabulating part of his work.
But I think came to genuinely feel considerable care for the well-being of each of the men who worked for him, as well as the factory superintendent, his friend and boss. I remember his telling the stories of working for him and expressing genuine concern for all the workers’ well-being. This included pressing the company for high safety standards.
He received several honors for his work and his treatment of employees.
My career path was a little more complex. At first, I was going to follow career opportunities in something that was at least remotely similar to my father. I started in college as chemical engineer. But that was not my heart. (It was also not my intellectual capability; I nearly flunked out of organic chemistry in my first year!)
Fortunately, I had some life-shaping experiences through Young Life, a ministry focused on high school kids. This fit with my instincts, skills and emerging abilities. I attended seminary and further explored the possibilities of this line of service.
Seminary encouraged me to “do what I love.” Yet there have been times in doing what I love that I have learned to “love what I do.”
In his work as a metallurgist, my dad came to love what he did when he recognized that his style of managing was beneficial to his workers. And he realized that he was building farm equipment to help the community with its important need for productive farms. He saw that his workers benefited from his style of managing, and the nation benefitted from the products his plant was producing.
I think if my dad had reflected on his work form a theological perspective, he would have made a stronger faith-work connection. For him, it was enough to do it right, and he did. He served his company, his country and his fellow citizens, but probably never thought about it in those terms. He just did what was right and seemed to “fit.”
In Make Your Job a Calling, Dik and Duffy write: “Bottom line: if doing good is a good thing to do, good for others, and good for you, and if for is a good place to do good, why not do good at work?” I believe my father did this and felt good about doing it.
The Green Room 