This semester I taught a course in the leadership minor called “Vocation Specific Leadership.” William C. Placher’s wonderful anthology Callings was one of our texts.

For the final exam, my students are putting two thinkers from the anthology in conversation with each other, and one student drew together two quotations in a particularly insightful way:

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them. -Simone Weil

We must not imagine that we discover this destiny only by a game of hide-and-seek with Divine Providence. Our vocation is not a sphinx’s riddle which we must solve in one guess or else perish. -Thomas Merton