Teaching and Fruitfulness: A Very Short “Gay and Catholic” DVD Extra Post

It’s impossible to come up with a complete list of vocations, so don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict, like, “Figure Skating and Fruitfulness” on you people. But I have been struck by how many of my lgbt Christian friends end up teaching at various levels. (This is also my excuse to link to Sarah’s post on what her students learn, and mislearn, from Christian culture wars.)

To me that looks like a way of living out the extremely common desire to serve the next generation: the same thing I’m doing with my pregnancy-center work. But just as I didn’t start crisis pregnancy counseling because I wanted to serve the next generation (I am ideologically in favor of babies but they can be kinda hard to talk to), my impression is that most of my lgbt Christian teacher friends didn’t sit down and puzzle out this element of their vocations. They didn’t say, “Hmm, my life seems to have a kid-shaped gap, I wonder if teaching can fill that gap.” Instead they did the things that made them happy, and for which they seemed to have some talent. One problem with the quest model of vocational discernment is that you may not even be able to identify all the roles your vocation is playing in your life, all the little crevices of your soul which this key fits.