I have found myself paging through the Macalester Course Catalog several times recently. Although I am only a first-year, I feel pressure from various people to give a definite answer when they ask me, “What are you going to major in?” I am careful to avoid the question with people who try to make small talk with me so that they won’t give me a look that says, “So you’re one of those undecided vegetarian liberal arts kids who plans to join the Peace Corps and start an organic farm with other hippies.” I want to give them a firm answer to the question for their approval and my personal sense of security about the future.

There is a song that runs through my head when I think about what I should pursue. The lyrics are: “Where your greatest source joy/Intersects with the needs of the world/Go and find that place/And hear your calling at the Crossroads.” These words comfort me by showing that my vocation after college should be something that I love to do and remind me what the focus of my work should be. Our calling “intersects with the needs of the world,” not just our own “needs” of a large salary. What makes our career decisions so difficult are the numerous issues that draw our time and attention.

How do we determine what areas we find the most deserving of our energy? Many of us look to a specific person in our past who inspired us-maybe it was a professor who had a passion for the Civil War or an author who wrote a favorite book on astronomy. Our vocations are passed down to us in a variety of ways, and there seems to be no logical reason to why some peoples’ “callings” speak to our hearts and others do not.

The one influential person who stands out in my mind in my search for a calling is an infant I held when I visited Haiti in the summer of 1999. In Port-au-Prince, I volunteered at an orphanage that cared for children with AIDS, tuberculosis and severe malnutrition. On my first day there, I walked between rows of cribs in a room that contained the youngest and sickest children, looking for one who was awake whom I could help to feed or hold. I walked past one crib that held a baby boy who immediately lifted his arms towards me. I picked him up and did not set him back down until I had to leave, because I tried to return him to his crib, he would begin cry loud wails that I could not bear to hear. I simply carried him around the room.

I only held that child every day that I returned. He sat stone-faced as I bounced him on my knee or made funny faces, but he screamed in fear when I tried to set him down. On the last day that I went to the orphanage, the child gave a response to my attempts to entertain him-he called me “Mama.” When it was time for me to leave, he began to shriek “Mama!” incessantly. I quickly returned him to his crib and walked outside, listening to him calling for me. I leaned against the wall and began to sob. In that moment, I felt a profound sense of being called, not only by infant who called me “Mama” but also by something greater. I call this something greater “God”; others might call it true humanity, a spirit of life, or maybe no name at all. Whatever name I give to, or understanding I have of, the feeling I had within me, I knew that I felt called to work toward a world in which every child could be held and loved.

I will continue to search through the course catalog to decide what major is where my “greatest source of joy intersects with the needs of the world.” I encourage other students who also search for their life’s calling to listen to the voices that have spoken to their hearts and to trust that those voices will help to guide them on whatever path they choose to take.