Discerning Your Calling

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It’s a perennial question, “what are you going to be when you grow up?” When you are very young the question points to a beguiling universe of possibilities. When you’re getting ready for college or trying to decide on another career option, the question speaks of an urgent need to decide, often on what seem pretty flimsy grounds. When you’re in a career that doesn’t satisfy or living through a corporate “right sizing” the question seems to be too directly tied to pure survival for real objectivity.

However this question lands with you, this post invites you to wrestle with the options with the confidence that you have a unique combination of abilities that can help you discern your calling.

I invite you to browse the site of the Center for Faith and Work for more resources including this helpful video interview of Tim Keller.

https://faithandwork.com/

What follows is an approximate transcript of my interview with Dr. Scott Whitmore.

[00:03] Mike Gray: This season, I'm interviewing people who are telling their stories of transformative learning. Transformative learning is catalyzed when we're confronted with what's been called a disorienting dilemma. The collision happens when you have the courage to ask questions that may unseat your previous thinking. Today we're going to be talking about careers, and more specifically, the notion of pursuing a calling. Transformative learning in this context is asking questions to find out what you were made to do, the contributions that we are uniquely equipped to make. I hope you'll join us. One of the biggest questions anyone answers is, what are you going to do when you grow up? Today we'll be exploring why this is often a difficult question to answer. My guest is Dr. Scott Whitmore. Scott has a PhD in genetics from the University of Iowa, and he serves there as an assistant research scientist at the University of Iowa Institute for Vision Research. His research focuses on inherited retinal diseases. That is, vision loss that runs in families. It's inherited. And he and his wife Laura homeschool their four kids. Welcome to the podcast, Scott.

[01:35] Scott Whitmore: Thank you.

[01:37] Mike Gray: So today we're going to be talking about vocation. And if you think about that word, vocation is literally a calling. You can notice that the root is the same as to vocalize, to speak. Of course, from my Christian perspective, it's God who is calling, and he's calling based on the unique ways he's gifted each of us. So let me ask you this, Scott. Did you grow up hearing about vocation beyond the standard? What are you going to be when you grow up?

[02:14] Scott Whitmore: No, I didn't hear it as vocation. No, that was not really a concept or a category that I remember. And so again, it might have been there, and I just missed it, but I never remember that as I grew up.

[02:30] Mike Gray: But obviously you probably contemplated what you might do, and so there was a sense in which the word used or not. Children in particular are interested in a variety of things and can kind of see themselves in professions that they don't necessarily have the gifts for—to end up in, but they just sound attractive. I remember as a third grader, I intended to be a firefighter, and that didn't happen. And good thing it didn't for a variety of reasons. So, this was not something that was discussed in your upbringing. Do you have any early ideas about what you might do or did work sound like something way off in the future?

[03:19] Scott Whitmore: I had lots of ideas. I'd say the majority of the ideas tended to move around something doing with natural history, zoology kind of pursuits. My mother was a biology major in undergrad and then went on and got a second bachelor's in physical therapy. But she always had this really, oh, let's go catch something sort of approach to things. My father had been in high school—he wanted to be a marine biologist. He grew up on the Mississippi Gulf coast, but then felt God's call into the ministry. He loved fishing and being outside, and so we were outdoors a lot. I had lots of opportunities to catch stuff. And so, I kind of, I think, partly saw myself as maybe growing up wanting to be something like a combination of Gerald Durell or David Attenborough or the crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, especially reptiles and amphibians, but I loved insects. So, yeah, something that would let you know, pick up bones in the wild and catch alligators was sort of what I was thinking about a lot. But I also had interest in art. I got interested in computer programming. I would get computers from the town dump. New Hampshire was wonderful because the dump became sort of the mall. And so, you could jump into the dumpster and haul out an old 286 or 386 computer and bring it home and see if it worked. And so, I would tinker with computers. I didn't really know. And then in high school, I went to a smaller Christian school, and they had opportunities for the high school guys to preach. And so, I got involved in that. And people had encouraged me to go into full time Christian service. And so, there were many different things, but I didn't have a particularly clear picture growing up.

[05:30] Mike Gray: As recently as 100 years ago, one's calling was settled by the family you were born into. I mean, men did typically what their father did, whether that was a farmer, blacksmith, or lawyer or pastor. Women were generally called to be housewives. Today, we rebel at this kind of prior restraint, but it certainly made things simple. So, with the removal of the expectation that, of course, you're going to do what your dad did and his dad did before him, life becomes significantly more complicated. So, in general, not just because we're 100 years from that reality, but why is the choice of vocation now, I think, difficult for everyone?

[06:22] Scott Whitmore: I think part of that, as you kind of mentioned, is the loss of constraint and those constraints being more or less inherited. The flip side of that is opportunity and options for people who have the ability to go to college. I'll put it that way. There are many, many directions you could go, and so trying to choose from the options can be a bit overwhelming. And some people seem to have it's just really easy and obvious. And other people, it takes a lot of work to try to figure out what they're going to be doing as they sift through these options and then sift through maybe various expectations, either from family or from the culture at large as to what would be a desirable occupation.

[07:16] Mike Gray: So, the multiplying of options, new jobs being created all the time, jobs that weren't available to your parents. And probably it's fairly typical for parents of the last few generations to want their children to have opportunities that they themselves didn't have, whether that was lack of that being an option financially or constraints in some other way. So, everybody, I think, has lots of options in front of them. You mentioned people who go to college, but even people who elect not to, for whatever reason, there are also lots of options available as well as lots of job choices. So, your dad was a steel worker, for instance, and you always thought you would work for the steel mill and now dad's not working for them either, right? The landscape of options is not static either. For some, that's frustrating. They always thought, dad thought he'd always work for that company. And maybe some of his children felt like, yeah, that's job security. If I can't do anything else, I can do that. That's a known quantity. What personal factors do you think make the choice of vocation more challenging for some than others, given that kind of reality?

[08:48] Scott Whitmore: When you say personal factors, are you thinking about personal circumstances or personality kind of traits?

[08:58] Mike Gray: Could be any of the above, yes.

[09:01] Scott Whitmore: I have observed some people who I think would have loved to move in a certain direction, but because of their family background or their economic background, they just didn't have those opportunities. And so, they didn't have the kind of requisite training to get them to where they needed to be to enter into a particular line of work. I think also it can be difficult. I find it fascinating when you read about people who know exactly what they want to do from a young age. So, one of these people would be C. Everett Koop, who was the former surgeon general under Ronald Reagan. And in his I mean, that guy knew from elementary school that he wanted to be a surgeon. And so, what it did was it allowed him to really focus on what that would be like. He found opportunities. I think his mother had been a nurse and so they would get random stray cats, I think cats and dogs maybe where they lived in New York City. And he’d you know, remove one of their reproductive organs in a home surgery. And so, he started like, it's crazy, but he started out doing that kind of thing, and then when he was, I think, in high school, he figured out a way to get into the local hospital and watch surgeries. He kind of posed as a medical resident or something. Right. Those kind of people are great. I find their stories amazing, but I think a lot of people don't have that idea of where they're going to go. And so, they may have lots of interests. They may be kind of good at different things, and nothing is outstanding. I think that can make it challenging to try to then figure out, okay, I don't have this one idea. I don't have this singular expectation that my family gives me then, yeah, they may not know exactly where to go from there.

[11:05] Mike Gray: Yeah. And I think maybe to think more specifically like a person who does not perceive that they have particular gifts in any particular area, they're just average in their assessment that there's nothing that particularly stands out, find it difficult to take advantage of options in front of them. But likewise, people who are good at lots of things find it challenging for an entirely different set of reasons. Like the universe of possibilities seems to be almost endless and they're not sure how they make a choice given all those options. Does that resonate with you, either one of those?

[11:53] Scott Whitmore: Yeah, I think so. For me, I think I was academically good in high school, kind of across the board for the high school setting I was in. And in college I was basically B average good in most everything, give or take a grade point here or there. And so, it wasn't entirely obvious. There wasn't just one thing I was good at, I guess. And there wasn't anything that I was maybe super excelled at either. If you looked at my transcript record, I think in undergrad at least, and…

[12:31] Mike Gray: We may circle back around to that, but there's challenges on either end of the spectrum. So, a lot of people perceive themselves as not being particularly gifted, although God's made them to do something that he expects them to try and pursue clarity about. When did you first learn about a Christian view of vocation?

[12:55] Scott Whitmore: Yeah, so I think the kind of theologically infused concept of vocation I remember, I think it was back in probably around 2014. I haven't been able to go back and find the exact time slot, and it kind of happened in an interesting set of circumstances. My wife and I had started to attend a church that was 35 minutes north of where we lived while we were in the PhD program here at Iowa. The church was a Baptist church in the Southern Baptist convention, but it was very appreciative of the reformation and a lot of the theological insights that had come out of the reformation. And so, in October, they would have a reformation day service. And in the course of being a part of that church, I was asked to become an elder. And so, I became a lay pastor at the church. The other guys had gone through kind of the classic solas of the reformation by grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone. They'd already, over the previous years, sort of covered these on the Reformation day topic. And I don't know exactly where I'd seen it, but I'd seen the idea of vocation being connected to the reformers. And so, it was sort of my turn. I hadn't done this. And so, I was like, okay, what if I give a talk on the reformers view of vocation? Because I'd seen this, and it interests me, and I've always been and was still trying to figure out what am I supposed to be doing? And so why not try to think about this using some of the categories of the past? And I dove in, and I read a few books kind of leading up to that that helped me put together this concept a little better and get the historic background of maybe why the reformers in particular had latched onto vocation as a category. And so that was really the first time I had an opportunity to dive into that concept and try to explore it more.

[15:08] Mike Gray: So, in diving into that, did you find that being a Christian simplifies or complicates the picture?

[15:17] Scott Whitmore: Both.

[15:23] Mike Gray: How does it make it simpler?

[15:25] Scott Whitmore: Let's start there. Being a Christian makes it simpler in that you have constraints, you have limits, and you really are only going to flourish within those limits. The limits then are you are a creature, you are bound in time, you are in a body, and you have responsibilities that are given. So, I'm going beyond the reformers here. As a creature, you have a responsibility to God. And so that's going to put some lines of work out of rank or so, out of bounds, I should say. And there's not a lot like that, but that's going to cut off some things, and it's probably going to get you to think, it should get you to think twice about a lot of the default ways in which people do go about a lot of jobs, a lot in terms of ethics and how you approach the ethical limits of the goals and the ends that you're pursuing. I think it's helpful to realize that one of the things that you find is that it's a real temptation today, especially to try to continually wish like you had more time, realizing that God gives you 24 hours a day intentionally, and that is a good thing. Then also will scale back some of how you approach that work and maybe even some of the jobs you try to pursue. I think also as a Christian, you are given certain kinds of responsibilities that you can't ignore. And so, you can't live your life as if you are your own, you are God's. And because of that, God has given you relational responsibilities to your family. If you're married, to your spouse, if you have children, to those kids, if you're part of a church, to your fellow church members. And I think that can actually help to constrain sometimes the constant pull to other options. Yeah.

[17:40] Mike Gray: And I think the scripture in First Corinthians 6:19 and 20 from the ESV speaks to this also says, “or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” The scripture is quite clear that ultimately, in some sense, God's made a determination. And it's not that all options are open to you, as you've indicated, some are closed down for reasons of your Christian integrity. But the idea positively here is that you need to find what you're made to do so that you can glorify God in your body. So, if we take that last piece, is that part of what might complicate the picture?

[18:35] Scott Whitmore: I want to be careful using that text to pull that into necessarily. Okay. How are you going to maximally glorify God? By finding the right vocation, I think in that text you're looking throughout Corinthians at kind of an ethical thing, like, how are you relating to other people? Right? Not necessarily. That means you need to find the exact thing. And once you find that thing, then you will be maximally glorifying God. Because what that does is it places, I think, a burden on you to foresee, in a sense, the future and be able to recognize that, oh, yes, this is exactly where I should be. And I think there's the danger of sometimes moving in that direction is when doors shut, plans change, things outside of your control have changed. It can really jar people into thinking that somehow I'm not giving glory to God because I'm no longer doing what I was dead sure this is what God had called me to do. So, I think in some of those passages, and really, I think throughout the New Testament, a lot of the emphasis is on what are you doing right now? Like, how are you treating your neighbor? Are you treating your neighbor with love? And even where you do get explicit instruction on work in Paul's letters, a lot of that is directed to slaves who don't have any option for making those kinds of choices, necessarily. And what their option they do have is how do they respond in the work that they find themselves in. And so you do have an option to do the work as unto God and not just to please those around you or to do it with kind of a surface level. So, I think part of that is the emphasis in the New Testament gets on the subjective response just because, frankly, not everyone has those things. I think, though, when you are given these options to think clearly about which direction you should go, which is just not everybody has that as a baseline. But when you are, you have to see that as a gift and a stewardship. And if you can see that as a gift and a stewardship, then if that stewardship is lifted from you at some point in the future, then it's not crushing that somehow I've fallen out of God's will because I missed the one thing that was going to give him the most glory. That's how I've been thinking about that, especially more recently. Yeah.

[21:25] Mike Gray: And I guess I'm looking at the text and all it says is glorify God in your body.

[21:30] Scott Whitmore: Right.

[21:32] Mike Gray: Whatever choice you make has to be a choice that you're going to bring glory to God.

[21:39] Scott Whitmore: Exactly.

[21:40] Mike Gray: So, as you indicate, some people have constraints as slaves in the New Testament times did. So, there is the potential for, I'll just say paralysis. If we're of the mind that there is a perfect will of God for me, that once I find it, then I settle into it. Until then, I'm in a quandary about whether the options in front of me are the thing that God has uniquely equipped me to do or not. A lot of people get hung up on that. You kind of nibbled around the edges of that. You want to say anything directly about the problematic nature of the perfect will of God?

[22:33] Scott Whitmore: Oh, definitely. This was something that I think that idea of finding God's perfect will for your life, I think, is more present in certain Christian traditions than in other Christian traditions. And it was certainly something that was very much active in the tradition that I grew up in. What was so interesting, I never got this pressure from my parents, and I'm very thankful I was never pressured to go a particular direction from my parents. Sometimes I wished maybe they'd offered a little more guidance, but I was very thankful that it wasn't one thing I had to be in or one chosen thing for me. And I never remember getting from them. My father was a pastor. I never remember getting from either of them. Kind of that focus on finding God's perfect will for your life. But at the school that I went to, often the speakers we had in chapel services could have this kind of emphasis. Now, it wasn't everybody. I remember even one guy saying, it's not like God is on the other side of this pit that's between you and God. And he's like, come here, come here. You're going to find me and trap you in this perfect will, or something like that. This is just not how it worked. But there was that tendency to describe things that way, and that can be very paralyzing because you fail to realize that God has given you agency and you can have responsible action. God has also not revealed to you at the front of your life what you might be able to observe looking backwards, and he still expects you just to make choices. And so, it does relieve the pressure once you realize that I'm not actually supposed to be discerning out this exactly, getting it, walking the knife edge of exactly what God's will is. A lot of that I'll realize in retrospect of how God led me. What he wants me to be doing is he wants me to be taking seriously his command to love him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength and love my neighbor as myself. And that is presented in a myriad of very small daily choices that are the steps along which I walk. And it's only once you've been walking like that that you can start to look backwards and say, oh, okay. I start to see how some of the pieces fall together.

[25:03] Mike Gray: And I think as those pieces start to come together, we start to know ourselves better. And I think there is a dimension here that God's uniquely gifted you in ways that over time, you're going to find what you're suited for as you act in obedience. And sometimes that means taking some risks and putting yourself in a place where you're going to find out whether you have gifts in this area or not. In fact, that's a great way to find out something about your spiritual gifting in the church is to kind of put yourself out there and find out what God and your fellow believers affirm to be your gifts or your lack of gifts. So, growth is partly a growth in self-knowledge. So how does this increasingly precise self-knowledge help you to pursue the vocation that you're called to?

[26:15] Scott Whitmore: Self-knowledge along these lines is critical, but sometimes the kinds of things you start learning about yourself aren't the most obvious in application. And then it becomes so later.

[26:31] Mike Gray: I'm thinking, for instance, about a student that I had actually, more than one, viewed themselves as going to medical school. And yet it was obvious from their academic struggles that they had not been created to go that path, that for some reason they had latched onto that, that somehow God was going to make that happen. When in several cases that I'm thinking about, in spite of the fact that the person would almost literally burn themselves out trying to maximize their performance, that they hadn't been given the intellectual gifts to be successful in that area. So, they didn't have accurate self-knowledge, but they had this sense from somewhere of what they were supposed to be doing. So, it was a recipe for frustration. And if they really felt like somehow, they had gotten a glimpse of what God wanted them to do from God himself, could be bitterness with God for not coming through for them. So that's the inaccurate knowledge of self. But there is this growing sense of what you are gifted to do and what you have fewer gifts for, but other people have them. So, we're working in community, in the church in particular, and other people have those gifts. And it's not simply all the pieces of the body are interchangeable because they're definitely not right.

[27:59] Scott Whitmore: And so, you learn these things in community. A lot of the self-knowledge, as you've said, comes through being a part of a community, particularly of a church community, and having building friendships within the church and without the church and listening when people tell you you're actually good at that, you have some talent in this area and you ought to do something with it. And so that can both help in narrowing things down. And it can also be the thing that also creates intermittent tension because you realize, okay, now people are saying, I have gifts in this area. What do I do with that when I'm doing something else? And so, I've had several points in my life where people were very helpful, friends or people within my church or even family, they were just very helpful in pointing things out that I was good at. And then taking that feedback seriously is part of that self-knowledge process. So, you say, okay, I'm willing to recognize that you recognize this. And despite my doubts about myself, what does this look like? So, for instance, I wound up going to undergrad, and I majored in biology after toying, really, I had thought about applying to graphic design, biology or Bible program because people in high school had said, not my parents, but it was like, if you have talent in preaching, then you should become a preacher. That was just what it was supposed to be, or you might be going to miss God's perfect will for your life. So, I had this external thing, but also people did recognize that I had just strong interest in the sciences and biology and these kinds of things. But through, even in high school, I had a couple of friends who told me, you should consider being a teacher because you're good at that. I had hesitancies on that for various reasons. The biggest reason I didn't want to be a teacher is because I knew that I would be responsible for handing back feedback to students in a timely manner. In high school, I could get A's and stuff, but I was doing it like the last minute, and I knew I couldn't be doing that if I was going to be a teacher. But I had a couple of friends who just kept telling me all the way through. And so, my first semester of my junior year in college, that is when one of my close friends is like, you really, really need to think about teaching. And I didn't know what I was going to do with a biology degree. I didn't have patterns of people that I grew up watching as biologists. I don't think I knew anyone doing research. I mean, I grew up in rural New Hampshire, right? We weren't in a college town. I don't think I knew anybody doing research. I had very limited contact with anybody who worked at a university, if at all. And so, I didn't have models or archetypes to follow in that. So, when I got to college, I was like, well, I just like this, right? So as my friends are saying, you should really think about teaching. You've got a knack for this. When I was a junior, I decided, all right, I'm going to actually think about this because I don't know what I'm doing after college. And then, so the more I thought about it, I thought, well, if I'm going to teach, it's probably going to be at the college level. And one of the things that got me thinking, this was really your General Biology class and Essentials of Cell Biology and just how you approach teaching, plus the way that Tom Coss could just make the zoology stuff so much fun, he was just full of stories. And I still remember some of these crazy stories about herpetologists that he had met. And it just made the whole or parasitology or whatever. And there were a few other professors like that, Brian Vogt and Bill Lovegrove in undergrad who were really doing stuff in their classes, or Stephen Schaub in computer science. And so, I was seeing this stuff. And I came to you that first semester of my junior year, and I said, all right, I'm thinking about teaching as a vocational track or job. Probably didn't use the vocation language then. And you recommended, I said, what is the book that would capture what you are doing best? And you told me, Learning How to Learn by Novak and Gowin. And I think you said something like, it's not perfect, but it's probably the closest thing that describes what I'm doing. And you also recommended Richard Paul's critical thinking book. And I went to the library, and I pulled out Richard Paul and it's like, I don't know, 500 pages or something. It's big. And I got a little bogged down and a little put off by his dismissal of, I think there was something in there about kind of dismissing religious belief or whatever. But I picked up Novak and Gowin and I ate it up. I realized there were a few books in undergrad, textbooks, at least that I actually read. Technopoly was one of them. It was a couple of books I read in undergrad outside of the class that made a big impact. And one of them was Learning How to Learn. And so, then that gave me a framework to understand what you were doing in class and to think, maybe I could do this too. You had emphasized critical thinking. You had emphasized Socratic questioning. And I thought, this looks like a lot of fun. At the same time, I was struggling just to get stuff turned in on time. There was just too much to. Was trying to remember. I think it was my next semester, I got involved in the Macbeth play. Some friends of mine had said, hey, you should try out for Macbeth, or, no, they said, we're trying to go try out for Macbeth. And so, five minutes before tryouts, I was like, yeah, why don't I go too? And I got a speaking line, all like five lines. And then I think I was taking, trying to remember what I was taking. Was it Genetics? And then Data Structures that semester and maybe third semester of Greek. It was killing me just to try to stay on top of stuff. So, I knew I kind of wanted to go into teaching, but I also knew that I was very bad at juggling and getting things done productively. My wife Laura is incredibly good at just getting stuff done as soon as it was assigned and I would just be doing too many other things, having too many other conversations, and then get it done at the last minute and scrape by with whatever grade I could get. So, there was this tension. If you're going to be a teacher, you got to be able to turn stuff around, but people are telling you you should probably look to become a teacher. And so that was one of those points where I started moving in a direction, even if I didn't feel like I had all the pieces down. But this pattern happened several other times, that really critical spots in graduate school, for instance, where people said, you should keep doing this or what have you, and it made big impact on what I'm doing now.

[35:33] Mike Gray: One of the influences that you've told me on your pursuit of vocation was the book published in 2012 called Every Good Endeavor, which the late Tim Keller wrote. The book is subtitled Connecting Your Work to God's Work. How much do you think making that connection is nice? Or is it absolutely obligatory that Christians do that? I think that's perhaps part of the reason why historically, in some circles, anything involved in Christian ministry is immediately, if you have any opportunity or ability in the area, it's immediately at the top of the list because it can easily be connected to God's work. And I think the other part for people who have biological ability is probably to go into medicine because it's easy to make that connection. How important do you think it is to make the connection?

[36:39] Scott Whitmore: I think it is a wonderful gift when you can, and it's certainly not necessary to think through that and be able to articulate it. So, there's a lot of people doing really good work in the world, a lot of Christians who are doing good work, and they may never have thought exactly how does this connect to the advancing of God's kingdom and his glory, right? You think about people who are maybe in the trades or a trash collector, right. If you didn't have trash collectors in the city, life would be pretty nasty. But it's something that by doing it just faithfully and going into work and showing up, and that it has a blessing on the flourishing and the joy of people around them, whether or not that person could go, yes, I see how God is glorified by my taking out the trash. You don't have to get it right. I think it can be really helpful, especially where there are obvious tensions in the field, especially when there's ethical dilemmas that show up. I haven't got this always correct myself, but I think it is helpful then to start thinking through, okay, how do I navigate a particular, maybe bioethical issue? Being a Christian, what kind of research am I going to get involved in? What kind of data analysis am I going to do? Where do I draw lines? I think that can be really good to do, and just to kind of stop and say, all right, how do my Christian commitments, where do they maybe push me to put emphasis, and where do they keep me from driving in a particular research direction or maybe staying out of a particular collaboration or something like that? So, I don't think it's an absolute necessity that a Christian be able to articulate, especially be able to articulate how what they do connects to what God is doing in the world. And I think C. S. Lewis is helpful here in Learning in Wartime. It was an essay that Lewis wrote back in the 1940s as Britain was entering the war. He was talking about, okay, so why are you even. People are coming to. I think he was still at Oxford at that time. People are coming to Oxford to study, and we have a war going on. Why wouldn't your life be simply consumed with the war? And Lewis says, well, step back. He says, if we're Christians, we have an ongoing war happening, and that is God's kingdom is coming on earth, and there are real spiritual forces fighting against it, and people are going to spend their lives eternally somewhere. And so, he said, before we answer the question about why we shouldn't just be consumed with this war that we're facing on continental Europe, we really have to answer this bigger question about why are we studying at all, if, to use a phrase, people are dying and going to hell today. One of the things in the process, I would really love that essay, but one of the things he mentions in there is it's not up to us to figure out how what we are doing right now fits into God's big picture, and we need to leave the future and the future of our work in God's hands. It may not be up to us to understand how my work has some impact. It's often after I'm dead and gone that the little aspects of my life or my interactions in the workplace or maybe some contribution I've made in an academic field is picked up and really does something. But you're just not given to know that ahead of time. What you are called is to do the work in your field well and responsibly. And so, I try to keep that in mind. I think it's great when you can connect, like what Keller is saying, what you're doing in your everyday life. But the book is also geared towards young professionals in New York City. But he does say at the beginning, I think he talks about an example of a porter at a hotel or an office building or somebody, a doorman at the building, and how this guy blessed people just by his everyday demeanor. And he acted happy to be there. He reached out to people, and I've met people like that, whether or not they're Christians, they're actually having a huge impact on the people around them, because when you see their work and their attitude to their work, you go away blessed. So, I don't think being able to articulate is necessary. I think it's a blessing and can be very helpful. And it can be very helpful when younger people coming after you or asking you, well, how can I go into this field when there's these issues you're facing? And you can say, all right, this is how I think about how my work connects back to what God is doing and that sort of thing.

[42:11] Mike Gray: So, let's talk about the fact you talked about having other people tell you that you had gifts in teaching, but at this point you're primarily involved in research. Are you still trying to work through what your giftedness does in this research environment? To a lot of people, I think research is very arcane, particularly people who are not in the sciences. And yet at this point in your life, that's what you think God has you doing. So, is there tension between the teaching side of things and the research side of things for you?

[42:54] Scott Whitmore: Yes, but it's a manageable tension. And let me explain how this works. So, I came out of my junior year until and finished out undergrad thinking, I'm going to teach. And you and Dr. Coss provided me the opportunity then for two years after undergrad to teach in the biology department as a graduate assistant, which was hugely formative for me. I pity the poor students who had to sit under me because I still hadn't worked out how to get things done and effectively. And one of the lessons I learned from that was if you're handed a class, the first thing you should do is spend at least one semester doing exactly what you were handed and set aside any ambition for revision, grand ideas, whatever, just like, do it, keep your head down, stay focused. It would probably have gone better for the students, and it probably would have gone better for me. I think every semester I was in undergrad in those two years, I probably lost weight over the semester because I found myself in so much stress. But at the same time. I really enjoyed it. I love watching the students make the connections in real time. I loved being able to plan out a series of questions and get a whole group or most of the group of students to come to the same conclusion and watch their faces change all at once. When it came time to apply to grad school, we had some challenges trying to get in, but eventually we were accepted at University of Northern Iowa, Laura and I, and we went there to do a master's in biology. I had this very pragmatic view. I was going to come in, do this research. This was a transition steppingstone. I had never done formal research before. I had taken a research course, and we'd done some small projects. We did a lot of lab work in undergrad, but we didn't do the kind of open-ended question, you go out and spend your whole semester or two years trying to build this thing up kind of research. Laura had that. She had come to University of Iowa to do a research experience for undergrads. I had not. So, I knew you and others had advised us to do our master's degree first and just see how it goes. And then after two years, you've got something, as opposed to jumping straight into a PhD, which was actually more common even then, I think. And then if you get, like, halfway through the PhD and it just doesn't work out, you're not stuck for five or seven years trying to get something done and being miserable through the whole thing. So, I came in with this kind of instrumentalist, pragmatic view. I'm here to do the research. I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it in order to go back to a liberal arts college. And so, I made it through the master's program. So, then we were accepted in a PhD program at Iowa, and we had applied to a couple different spots, but Iowa really quickly turned around our responded to our application and offered us an opportunity to come and interview. And so, we came and interviewed. Eventually, we were accepted at Iowa, and it was about a year before I finished, so we were accepted fall of 20—Well, we entered in August of 2010, and probably around 2014. To that point, I was thinking, I'm going to go be a teacher in a liberal arts college. And I'd had a couple of opportunities because I TA'd. I TA'd anatomy lab at University of Northern Iowa during my master's. I didn't do as much TA at Iowa because I just already had the experience. So, I never was instructor of record for a class, which is kind of essential, too, for getting into a lot of places to teach afterwards. But then in 2014, I was just working along, and the research had just been, that's hard work. And there were many points along that way from my master's degree until around 2014, where I wanted to quit. I almost got kicked out of the PhD program my first semester because I still hadn't completed my master's thesis. And I thought I kept people apprised of, okay, I'm working on this, whatever. But the head of the biosciences program, I got a strong email from him, like, hey, wait a minute, you didn't tell us about this. And I had been talking to admissions about it, but somehow it didn't get back to him that I hadn't completed my master's. And there were contingencies for progressing based on having completed the master's. And I didn't fully realize this. And so, I basically wrote my master's degree. I had lots of draft work, but I was just blocked. I was struggling. How do I put this together? And I had to sit down and write it in two weeks and then defend before December. And that was a really good thing. The head of the graduate program was very, very gracious to me, but that was one of those moments where I really thought, I want to quit. There was a point at the end of my master's, that's 2009, when we were applying to grad school for the next year, where I got some feedback from some faculty members, and I really wanted to quit. At that point, I thought, what's the use? Like, what am I really doing here? And then there were just points throughout the PhD where I was like, this is hard. I do not understand what I'm doing. I am confused. I am discouraged. And then 2014 rolls around, and I'm sitting at my desk, and I just have this epiphany moment. Like, I can actually do this. I realized people had been coming to me asking me, how do you do RNA sequencing work? Because a lot of my master's or my PhD program had been gene expression studies. So which genes are turned on and off in human eye tissue that had been donated through the eye bank program. And so, then people are coming to me, like, how do you set that up to experiment? How do you analyze the data? And I realized I was the local expert. I had gone from struggling for several years to, I think of it as a competency curve. You're going on this uphill, you're investing all this energy, and you get to this inflection point and all of a sudden, you're making lots more progress, and it's kind of enjoyable and fun, and people are implicitly recognizing that you're good at it because they have questions for you. You're not just going to other professors or other students and saying, how do I do this? And so that was a really critical point of self-knowledge, of understanding. I can do this. And it did change my view of the program from pragmatic. This is a means to an end. I'm going to get out, and I'll probably keep some sort of small research project on the side. But what I'm really going to do is go back and teach to, hey, I kind of like the research. That was the big point. And then once I was finishing up my PhD in 2015, I defended. In 2015, the director of our institute reached out to me via his secretary or said something. He wants to take you to this conference. And I thought, well, I don't know this guy very well, and I don't know why he's tapping me. When we got to the airport to fly out, he sat down with me and he said, okay, this trip is basically about me telling you, I want you to stay. Which was kind of a shocker that they would actually want me to stay. That was another point of community, recognizing and saying, you have talent here, the talent is valuable, and we want you to be a part of what we're doing. So, I was very honored to be a part of that. And so that's kind of how I stayed. And then I was in a postdoc for two years. There were, again, ups and downs in that I was hired on as a research scientist. So where does the teaching fit in then? Part of that is a lot of that teaching wound up happening at the local churches I was involved in, often through preaching or leading a Sunday school class or those kinds of outlets, giving talks. Occasionally Laura and I would go give a talk to a homeschool group or something like that. And along the way, even while I was doing the research, because I had built up some of this expertise in a couple of widely used techniques, I was asked to give one off lectures. So unlike undergrad, a lot of the graduate courses we had in our PhD program were team taught. And so, you'd have one kind of instructor of record who would tap a bunch of faculty members to give some talk on one aspect of their research or one research method. And so, starting in my PhD program, I started getting asked to do that. And then it rolled over into my postdoc and going on from there. And then I had developed this interest in genetics and ethics, and when I was finishing up my PhD program, we were at a dinner, and I was sitting with the director of the genetics program and I said, you know, I think the mandatory National Institutes of Health ethics course is good insofar as it goes, but it's really deficient. There's a lot of stuff going on in genetics and ethics that we're not dealing with, and I think it'd be great if there was some outlet for that. He kind of filed that away, and then I was in my postdoc, he contacted me once or twice, and I didn't have the capacity to do it. And then one time they needed to do a refresher course, and so he tapped me and a couple of other people, and we gave, like 3 hours. Senior genetic students hear different aspects of where genetic research intersects with all these ethical questions, whether that's scientific integrity, questions like, what are ways you can falsify data and that you shouldn't, versus legal implications or genetics in society. So, I gave a spin on that. So, it's not that I haven't had opportunities to teach, it's that they're just much more minor now than what I thought they would have been coming out of undergrad, and really for several years after that. And still. There's still opportunities to get involved in more ways than just professional teaching.

[54:06] Mike Gray: Yeah, I think that's a good way to reconcile gifts and opportunities. Many people fall into their careers. They choose pragmatically, they go with the flow of opportunity. One of my wife's cousins, who recently retired from a 45-year career in banking, confessed that that's how he got into banking, and that not only is that how he entered the field in banking, but that he had absolutely no passion for his job. And he wanted to emphasize to me when we were up there this past summer, like, no passion ever. They had seminars for the people in the bank that you need to discover your passion and follow it. And he was saying that had no resonance with me at all. Said it was just a way to pay for the things that I wanted to have and support my family. And it's not an isolated incident. God made it possible for my wife and I to be in Scotland two years ago this summer and the last Airbnb we stayed in, in Glasgow, Scotland. Our host was a single 28-year-old man who was an economist, and he was a very gregarious guy. And we had an extended conversation during the week at one point, and he told me I've actually made enough money at 28 as an economist, I could retire. And I'm thinking, so why in the world do you have an Airbnb in your apartment? I mean, we're staying with him. And he said, because I have nothing in common with the economists that I work with, he said, I have no community. I like to meet people like you. He said, I actually hate economics. He said, I'm very good at it, but I hate it. And he said, the one point of light in his life at that point was a friend of his who was German and was teaching high school in Germany. He said, this guy, he said, I met up with him in Germany at one point, and he wasn't done with his school year. So, he told me to come along, told him, why don't you teach the class for a little while today? And he said, that was like the high point of my life. I really discovered that's what gave me joy. If I had it to do over, I'd be a high school teacher. And frankly, I'm thinking about, I don't need the money that I have right now. It doesn't make a difference to me that teachers don't get paid very well. So those are counterexamples where people had other motivation to go into their careers and they didn't have any joy in their career. They had no passion for what they were doing. And I hear your story very differently about research in terms of discovering at least part of what you were made to do. Is that an accurate read?

[57:19] Scott Whitmore: Yeah. It would be smoothing out too many rough spots to say that it's always been a joy giving experience. Sure.

[57:33] Mike Gray: But on the whole, I think that's true of everybody in every career.

[57:38] Scott Whitmore: I think you're right. On the whole. Yeah. I've been incredibly blessed in so many ways to have this particular job right now. And so because it's really multifaceted, not only. I mean, probably one of the biggest things is just the people I work with. The Midwest is flyover country. It's flyover country. But if you're driving through, stop and spend some time, Iowa is known for having very nice people, and it's really kind of true. So Iowa is just this great place. And what you wind up working with, by and large, are people who have that. Like, I really enjoy the research that doing, and it's, it's a lot of it's pulling. I'm finally, like, in the past couple of years, pulling together aspects of computational modeling of biological processes that I was first getting interested in. When I was taking your class in cell and molecular biology. And it's taken me nearly 20 years actually be able to do what I was reading about back then. So that's been really fun. But the people I work with are great. The things that it does provide certain benefits for my family. I mean, it's meant that Laura can stay home with the kids and homeschool, and we can be fine on just my salary. And that's a huge blessing. A lot of people can't do that. It's more than just the fact that I get to potentially help people by trying to understand retinal disease. It's also all these other fringe benefits that build this kind of meshwork of really thick experience that I enjoy.

[59:26] Mike Gray: That's good. Well, there's lots of other things we could talk about. We'll call it good for this time. Thanks for being willing to share your story, Scott.

[59:37] Scott Whitmore: Thank you, Dr. Gray.

[59:44] Mike Gray: As a follow up to Scott's story, join me in two weeks when my son, Dr. Will Gray, will join me. Will is the founder and director of Vocationality. Vocationality is a company that was designed to help you discover who you are and the work you were uniquely created to do. Join us as we ask questions that will challenge your assumptions about work and its place in your life.