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If It’s Your Calling, It Will Keep Calling. You’ve probably seen that on a coffee mug or a piece of wall art somewhere between the kitchen and the front door. Maybe you smiled at it. Maybe you walked right past it. Maybe it stopped you for just a second longer than you expected and you weren’t quite sure why.
I met a man outside of Flagstaff who knew exactly why. He just hadn’t said it out loud yet. He was in sales. Good at it too by the sound of it. Comfortable salary, company car, a territory he knew cold. He had the kind of settled life that looks exactly right from the outside and costs something on the inside that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. He ordered coffee and a slice of pie and within ten minutes he was talking about the classroom.
Not his classroom. Not anymore. The one he left fourteen years ago when the numbers stopped making sense and a recruiter called at exactly the right moment with exactly the wrong opportunity. He took the job. Paid off the debt. Built the life. And somewhere in the building of it he had misplaced the thing that made him feel like himself.
He wasn’t complaining. That’s the thing I want you to understand. He wasn’t sitting at that counter feeling sorry for himself or cataloging his regrets. He was just talking. The way people talk when they’ve been carrying something long enough that it starts coming out sideways in conversations with strangers over bad coffee.
But the classroom kept showing up. In the way he described his best sales calls as teaching moments. In the way his eyes changed when he mentioned a nephew he had been helping with math. In the way he said the word teacher like it still belonged to him even though he hadn’t used it in over a decade.
If It’s Your Calling, It Will Keep Calling and it doesn’t care how many years you’ve been gone.
If It’s Your Calling, It Will Keep Calling No Matter How Far You Drive
I’ve met a lot of people on this road who walked away from something they were meant for. Not because they didn’t love it. Because love doesn’t always pay the mortgage and the calling doesn’t always come with a retirement plan and somewhere along the way practicality won an argument it probably shouldn’t have.
A nurse who became a pharmaceutical rep. A musician who became an accountant. An ad exec’s kid who spent twenty years in corporate radio wondering why he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was supposed to be doing something else with a microphone. I know that last one pretty well.
The details change. The story doesn’t. You find yourself at a counter somewhere between where you started and where you ended up and the thing you walked away from is sitting right there next to your coffee like it never left. Because it didn’t. Callings don’t leave. They just wait. With a patience that is honestly a little unsettling when you think about it too long.
The question is never whether the calling is still there. It is. The question is whether you’re going to keep pretending you don’t hear it.
If It’s Your Calling, It Will Keep Calling Until You Answer
I asked him what was stopping him from going back. He got quiet in the way people get quiet when the answer is right there and they haven’t quite given themselves permission to say it out loud yet.
He said he didn’t know if he still could. Fourteen years is a long time. The classroom had changed. He had changed. What if the thing he remembered loving wasn’t the thing waiting for him if he went back. What if the calling was just nostalgia dressed up as purpose.
I told him that was a fair question. And then I told him that in my experience nostalgia fades. It has a shelf life. You think about something long enough with enough honest daylight on it and eventually it loses its glow and you move on.
But a calling doesn’t fade. It just shifts its weight from one foot to the other and keeps standing there. Fourteen years of a comfortable salary and a company car and it was still standing there at a diner counter outside of Flagstaff showing up in every third sentence.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s a calling doing exactly what callings do.
He finished his pie. Sat with his coffee a little longer than he needed to. Then he said something I’ve been turning over ever since. He said maybe the reason he was so good at the sales job was because he never stopped teaching. He just changed his classroom to a territory and his students to clients and his lesson plans to quarterly targets. The calling found a way through even when he thought he had closed the door on it.
I told him that sounded exactly right. And that the door he thought he closed had apparently been open the whole time.
What Happens When You Finally Pick Up
I don’t know if he went back to teaching. I hope he did. But even if he didn’t, something shifted at that counter and we both felt it. The recognition that the thing you’re meant for has a way of threading itself through everything you do whether you invite it or not. That you can change the job title and the industry and the zip code and the calling just quietly repacks its bags and follows you there.
That’s not a burden. That’s a gift. Even when it doesn’t feel like one.
If you’ve been running from something that keeps finding you, stop running long enough to ask why it keeps showing up. Not everything that follows you is chasing you. Some things follow you because they belong to you and they know it even when you don’t.
The road outside Flagstaff is long and straight and on a clear day you can see further than seems reasonable. I sat with my coffee after he left and looked out the window at all those miles and thought about every door I thought I had closed that turned out to be open.
Every single one of them led somewhere worth going.
✨ Roadside Reflection:
If It’s Your Calling, It Will Keep Calling and it doesn’t need your permission to do so. It doesn’t need you to be ready or certain or finished being afraid. It just needs you to stop pretending you don’t hear it. The man outside Flagstaff heard it in every sales call he dressed up as a teaching moment. I heard it every time I picked up a microphone and felt more like myself than I had all week. You’ve heard it too.
That thing that keeps showing up no matter how many times you change the subject. That’s not coincidence. That’s not nostalgia. That’s the most honest voice in the room telling you something you already know. Pick up. It’s been calling a long time. It’s not going to stop. And somewhere down the road you’re going to be really glad you finally answered.
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Faith and Good Courage is a podcast and journal by Christopher Tuttle.