I’ve spent time the last few days reading through the admissions essays for the incoming class of YDS MDiv students, and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement that I will get to work with these amazing students, scholars, pastors, and activists. But I also wonder: how many of these students will stand by their admissions essays when they come out the other end of their program? Or how many will recognize themselves in these personal descriptions 10, 20, 30 years from now?

Personal statements are an odd genre; at the time of writing they can feel definitive and determinative for who one is and what one wants to be and do in this world, but in reality they are historical documents marking a particular moment in an ongoing, lifelong process of discernment and becoming, not once-and-for-all statements of one’s divinely revealed identity.

Reading these essays has made me think back on my own vocational journey. In college, I was completely at sea when it came to my future. I had classmates who had known they wanted to be physicians or lawyers or business leaders seemingly since conception, but I had no clue about my own vocation. I began as an English major because I enjoyed it and was decent at it. When I switched to be a Religion major, it was for the same reason–that and the fact that I could not understand Yeats. I then went to seminary right out of undergrad because I genuinely had no idea what I wanted to do but I was confident it lay in the study and practice of theology. I think I wrote in my own MDiv admissions essay about wanting to do grass-roots community organizing. Through internships I tried out non-profit work and campus ministry. Nothing seemed to fit until I found Patristics and Augustine.

Then I thought I had it all figured out. Finally! A sense of calling and purpose! A real Vocation! I was called to be a scholar and teacher in graduate theological education with a commitment to the life of the church through ordination as a United Methodist deacon. And that’s how I planned to spend the rest of my life. I took a few years off, learned Latin and Greek, worked as a barista and a server, eventually entered a PhD program, graduated in 5 years, got the ever-elusive tenure-track job at a vibrant progressive seminary, and thought I was set for life.

But something wasn’t right. For a long time I was like a pig in shit, as the saying goes, amazed that I got to live the academic life at an institution that I believed in and that pushed me to grow even deeper into my vocation. Yet I was never fully satisfied. At some point, that place didn’t feel like a vocational home anymore for a complex nexus of reasons, some of my own making. So I left, searching for where I was supposed to be. This took me to an administrative role at a small theological college in Cambridge, UK. The setting was idyllic, and there were many things I loved about the job, but it still didn’t feel like the right fit, again for a complex nexus of reasons, some of my own making.

Perhaps, I thought, graduate theological education was not my calling. Perhaps I was called to academic administration in general. So I hopped back across the Atlantic–dragging my poor family with me–to work with undergraduates at Yale College. Again, there were many things to love about that job, and I will cherish my years there with gratitude. But it was, by design, a temporary gig with a term limit on it, and when the opportunity to secure a (hopefully) long-term position that would bring me back into my beloved world of graduate theological education came along, I jumped at it, believing (as I still do) that it would be the best context for living out my vocation.

But what exactly is that vocation at this point? I’m not a community organizer as I thought I might be. I teach some, but I’m not primarily faculty (certainly not tenure-track) as I once yearned to be. I’m not the scholar I thought I wanted to be, and after two books with Oxford University Press, I’ve basically given up on academic publishing because (1) I don’t really have anything more to say and (2) I found the stress of writing to be detrimental to my mental health. So what exactly is my vocation at this point?

I honestly do not know. And that might seem a strange thing for someone responsible for cultivating a sense of vocation in others to say! But I’m rejoicing in that not knowing. I mean, I know a little bit. I’m convinced that I’m called to live at the intersection of the church and the academy. I’m convinced that I’m called to think deeply about theological matters and to help others think deeply about them, too. I’m convinced that I’m called to be student-facing in much of my work. And I’m convinced that I’m called to contribute to the life of a life-giving community.

But I now realize that to say I have a singular vocational call with a clear path would be a lie. My path has been winding and iterative, and I believe that my vocation is less about a particular career path than it is about a way of being in the world, whatever my job may be. And that’s a lot scarier, honestly, than having a specific sense of one’s occupational and professional goal because it means I don’t have set targets or benchmarks for knowing if I’m “succeeding” in my life. I cannot rely on a tenure process to validate my life’s work. I cannot view my CV or resume as summative of my worth. And I cannot look to some professional ladder to climb to reach self-actualization.

But there’s something deeply freeing in that because it reveals to me a deep truth that I believe holds even for those whose occupational goals remain stable throughout their lives: We are all just making it up as we go along. I have to remind myself of this fact often because I, like many, suffer from severe imposter syndrome, especially when starting out in a new role. When will they find out that I don’t really know what I’m doing? Why don’t I immediately know how to do everything the right way? Yes, they hired me for this role because they believed I could do it well, but what if they were wrong?

Yes, we all, I think, have those moments when we feel at home in our work, competent and confident. But the older I get, the more I feel those blessed times are not the norm for most of us. Many of us live our lives waiting for the other shoe to drop, sure they will find us out, feeling as though our vocational validity is balanced on a razor’s edge, and we secretly crumble from the pressure we impose on our tight-rope-walking selves.

While I’m a big fan of the work of vocational discernment, I also realize that it is in part to blame for the anxiety that many of us feel about our work in the world. “Vocation” is good for attuning our hearts to how we might be called to contribute to God’s redeeming work in the world. But it can also produce an undue sense of pressure because it elevates our occupation to the level of identity, and it can reify our sense of identity in harmful ways.

Because the truth is, we are none of us one thing our entire lives or even our entire careers. We do not necessarily have a singular “identity” so much as many plural identities through which we live, and move, and have our being over time. We are always becoming who we are, and a healthy sense of vocation must incorporate a sense of openness to uncertainty and change.

And that means that a vocation cannot be simply about establishing a once-and-for-all professional goal with clearly laid out steps for mastering skills and achieving a stagnant vision of success. Rather, vocation is ever evolving, ever unfolding, even as we once thought we might have had it all figured out. A vocational perspective that is open to such change is a bit scary because it means we will never have it all figured out. And it means that we will feel like imposters as we try on new ways of working and being in the world. But if we are open to moving with the ever-flowing Spirit of God, and if we find our rest in the eternal love of God and not in temporal achievements, then we can find peace in knowing that everyone else is making it up as they go along, too.

After all, our vocation as Christians is rooted in the waters of our baptism, in which the grace of God’s Spirit is poured forth upon our lives. The earliest texts on liturgical practice emphasize that baptism should use “living” water, namely, water from a flowing source (I think I’m right about that!). Perhaps entering into the waters of baptism is not about receiving a stagnant calling but an invitation to join the ever-flowing stream of God’s redemptive work in the world. Perhaps there is something holy, then, about making it up as we go along, swimming in the current of God’s love wherever it takes us, however it may change us, and whoever it may make us.