Being at Home with Receiving and Giving

Somewhere I heard that discipleship is based on being at home with receiving and giving.  The document, “Vocation As A Business Leader,” published by The Pontifical Council (March 2012), expresses the meaning of living out one’s vocation.  In the first place, we must receive what God has done for us since we have been created by God.  This requires that we take the Sabbath for what it is, as something received and can only be appreciated when we detach ourselves from work.  In the second place, we are to give in a way that responds with what we have received.  David Schinder synthesizes this receiving –to-giving dynamic by stressing, “when we see ourselves as being created, as being gifted life, this receiving enables us to see our doing and having… as ways of giving which which they are meant to be.”  Moreover, the essence of our vocation is not about achievement, rather, to draw from what we have received.  

John Henry Newman aptly defines the essence of vocation:

“God created me to do Him some definite service…by committing some work to me which He   has not committed to another.  I have my mission, I never may know it fully in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  Somehow, I am necessary to His purposes…I am a link, a bond of connection between persons. He had not create me for naught.”