Your Calling Already Exists. You Just Haven’t Found It Yet.

There’s a question most people never ask themselves. Not because they don’t care about the answer, but because no one ever told them the question was worth asking.

What were you put on this earth to do?

Not what job should you have, not what career ladder should you climb, but what is the thing that, when you do it, makes you feel like you were made for exactly this? Dallas Willard described it this way: “You were built to count as water is made to run downhill. You were placed in a context to count in ways that no one else does. That is your destiny.”

What follows is a framework for understanding your calling, how it relates to your work, and why getting clarity on this single question can quietly reorder everything else.

What Is a Calling, Really?

A calling is not a career path. It is not a job title or a five-year plan. As Dave Rodriguez describes it, your calling is who you are as you do your life. It’s the thread that runs beneath everything, the thing that drives you even when no one is watching, even when it isn’t efficient, even when it isn’t paid.

Dave has a story that illustrates this better than any definition could. His late mentor Charlie was a physician, an IU Medical School faculty member, a Peace Corps volunteer, and part of a group of doctors who built a healthcare partnership in East Africa that now serves millions. By any measure, a remarkable career.

But Charlie’s calling was never medicine. It was mentoring. Everything else was the context in which he lived it out. In his final weeks, still shaping the next generation, he called Dave and a young man named Keith together and handed Keith to Dave. Charlie had been mentoring young leaders for over 50 years. The career was the vehicle. The calling was the engine.

That distinction matters. Because most people try to get the career to do the work the calling is supposed to do. And when it can’t, they wonder why they still feel empty.

Why Dave Rodriguez Believes Your Calling Is the Most Ancient Thing About You

Dave’s framework on calling is both theological and deeply practical. He believes your calling existed before you did, before your personality, before your body. It is, as he puts it, the most ancient thing about you. And because when you operate in your calling you leave a legacy that outlasts you, it is also the most eternal thing about you.

That kind of language can feel abstract until you hear Dimitri Snowden describe his.

“Every person we walk past without helping is a missed responsibility.”

That’s not a mission statement. That’s a calling. Dimitri’s driving force is serving the underserved, confronting injustice, and building systems that remove the friction keeping people from the life they could have. He didn’t choose it the way you choose a major. It chose him. He just had to name it.

Key Insights from the Segment

1. Your calling sets you apart, but it doesn’t isolate you. Dave, Dimitri, and Heather each have distinct callings, and yet those callings interlock. Dimitri meets people at the level of basic needs. Dave and the Destiny Works team help people move into purpose and wholeness. Each calling fills a gap the others leave. When people operate in their callings, community wellness increases exponentially.
2. Your calling and your career don’t have to match. This is the piece that brings the most relief. Dave outlines three valid relationships between calling and career. They can be unrelated, where the job funds the life and the calling operates alongside it. They can be integrated, where the calling is woven into the work without being identical to it. Or they can be identical, where a person builds a career directly around their calling. All three work. The key is knowing which one you’re in.
3. Not knowing your calling makes everything harder. If you’re trying to get your job to give you meaning it was never designed to carry, you will always feel the gap. Knowing your calling doesn’t mean quitting your job. It often means the job gets easier, because it no longer has to be everything.
4. Your calling produces legacy. Dave says it plainly: when you operate in your calling, you leave something behind that goes on for generations. Charlie’s story proves it. Decades after his conversations with young leaders, those leaders were having the same conversations with the next generation. The calling multiplied long after the person was gone.

The Three Ways Your Calling Can Intersect with Your Career

This is the most practically useful piece of the entire segment.

Unrelated: Your calling and your career operate in separate domains. Your job finances your life. Your calling fulfills you in other ways, through volunteering, mentoring, community involvement, or creative work. This is more common than people realize, and it is completely valid. In fact, knowing your calling often makes your job less of a burden, because the job is no longer responsible for your sense of meaning.

Integrated: Your calling is woven into the work you do without being the explicit focus of your job description. Heather Fisher is an executive coach. Her calling is to see people grow and thrive. That calling shows up in her professional work and in how she leads her life outside of it: through small groups, relationships, and community.

Identical: You have built a career directly around your calling. Dimitri Snowden’s call to serve the underserved is the engine of everything he does professionally. There is no separation between the calling and the career. He would be the first to tell you this is still a work in progress, because real life comes with real costs. But the direction is set.

Practical Application: Finding Where You Stand

1. Name what fires you. Not what you’re good at, not what makes money. What is the thing you cannot walk past? What injustice, what need, what gap in the world makes you lean forward? Start there.
2. Identify whether you’re unrelated, integrated, or identical. Be honest. Is your career connected to what you believe you’re built to do? If not, that’s not a failure. It’s information.
3. Look for the thread. Heather Fisher describes The Calling Quilt™ experience as seeing your life pictorialized, seeing the threads that run through everything. Often the calling has been present for a long time. It just needs to be named.
4. Take the next step, not the whole staircase. Calling doesn’t require a dramatic pivot. It might start with a conversation, a coaching session, or simply writing down what you notice when you feel most alive.

What Happens When You Know

“You are forever changed after that experience, seeing your life pictorialized, seeing the threads that run through everything, and then being able to say, ‘This is who and what I am. Now I can create something new with this.’ Just knowing that is an act of empowerment.” — Heather Fisher

That’s not marketing copy. That’s what happens when a person finally has the language for something they’ve felt their whole life.

At Destiny Works, The Calling Quilt™ is a one-on-one and workshop coaching process designed to help you identify your calling and understand exactly how it intersects with your vocation. Whether your calling and career are unrelated, integrated, or identical, the clarity changes everything.

Watch the full episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast: HERE

Discover The Calling Quilt™ coaching today!

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Full Transcript

Dave: Let’s shift gears and talk about meaning. This is really important to me. This is what Destiny Works was founded on: the idea that there is something about you that is a calling and a destiny. When a person does not know how to figure out the thing that moves them the most, the thing they are put on this earth to do, and they cannot figure out how that relates to their work, there’s a disconnect. And they struggle, because they don’t know how to make sense of something that moves them so deeply, and yet every day they’re not doing anything that touches that place.

So here’s a quote I love from Dallas Willard: “You were built to count as water is made to run downhill. You were placed in a context to count in ways that no one else does. That is your destiny.”

I love that quote because it implies that there were unseen hands that formed you as you are. I believe that’s God. And I know you two would be in that same place. But it also implies that this thing about you, this calling on your life, sets you apart from everybody else. I believe the calling is the most ancient thing about you. It existed before you did, before your body did, before your personality did. Your calling existed. And it is the most eternal thing about you, because when you operate in your calling, you leave a legacy behind you that goes on for generations. Ancient and eternal makes it pretty important.

Dimitri, do you have an idea of what your calling is?

Dimitri: I do. I’ll say it out loud: to serve people who are underserved. This theme of serving the overlooked, of confronting the injustices around them and working to reconcile those, fires me up. I cannot walk past it. It doesn’t matter what else is on my plate. If I see it, I have to address it. That’s how I’m built. Other people aren’t built that way. They’re built to see and respond to other things. But for me, every person we walk past without helping is a missed responsibility.

Dave: And I love how you leverage that calling into action. You want to reduce the friction that holds people back from the life they could live.

Dimitri: Systematically, I try to build infrastructure that moves people through social services with less friction. Because the individual might be doing everything right personally, but the system itself is still throttling them. So I have to put a wrench in those gears.

And the beautiful thing about how our callings work together is this: mine is focused on meeting people at the level of Maslow’s most basic needs. Here’s a sandwich, here’s some dry socks, here’s shelter. But after that, once you’re not hungry and not on the street anymore, the question becomes: now what do I do with myself? That’s where I hand them off to you guys. It’s a continuum of care. If we can each operate in our callings, the community wellness factor increases exponentially.

Dave: Well said. And here’s what I want people to hear. There are three ways that your vocation can intersect with your calling.

First, your calling and your job or career can be unrelated. We all know someone who runs a company, maybe a software business, who is, like Charlie, really a mentor at heart. That’s what lights them up. Their career finances their life, but their calling operates alongside it. That’s okay. In fact, it should make your job better, because your job no longer has to carry the full weight of your meaning. You have the calling working alongside it.

Second, your career and calling can be integrated, like Heather. She’s a coach, and her calling is to see people thrive. She does that through her work and through her broader life, through community, through relationships. She’s woven the calling into how she lives.

Third, Dimitri, what you’ve done is make your calling identical to your career. You’ve built a career directly around what you were made to do.

Dimitri: Yes, and I’ll be honest: I’m still testing the viability of that. Real life is real. The electric bill is still due. Groceries still have to happen. And sometimes that shapes or slows down what executing on your calling looks like day to day.

Dave: And that’s worth naming. So when a person listening realizes that your calling can be unrelated, integrated, or identical with your career, and all three are valid, that’s a relief. Because it means there’s no single right answer. There’s just your answer.

As we wrap up: at the core of Destiny Works’ coaching, in addition to The Vitality Journey, is what we call The Calling Quilt™. We offer it one-on-one and in a workshop format. If you’d like to know what your calling is and whether it’s unrelated, integrated, or identical with your career, Heather, along with Tawana, Micah, Olivia, and our Destiny Works coaches, would be honored to walk you through that.

Heather: And what an experience. I’ve been through it myself. You are forever changed after that experience, seeing your life pictorialized, seeing the threads that run through everything, and then being able to say, “This is who and what I am. Now I can create something new with this.” Just knowing that is an act of empowerment.