PSYC 635 Week 6 Reflection Paper Example

Reflection Paper: Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian and a Midlife Career Change Seen as Vocation

Introduction

At forty-two, after fifteen years as a paralegal, I enrolled in a graduate program in counseling. Friends have described the change, kindly, as a midlife crisis. Reading Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian, by Fowler (2000), offered another way to read the change. This paper summarizes how Fowler compares accounts of adult development, explains his idea of vocation and reflects on what that idea means for a person starting over in the middle of life.

Three Portraits of Adulthood

Fowler (2000) begins by placing three theories side by side. Erikson's psychosocial stages describe adulthood as a series of tasks, intimacy, then generativity, then integrity, each resolved well or poorly. Levinson's seasons describe eras of adult life separated by transitions, in which a person builds a life structure, questions it and builds again. Fowler's own stages of faith describe changes in how people make meaning, from trusting the beliefs of their community to examining those beliefs and holding them with more complexity.

What struck me is that Fowler does not choose among these theories. He treats each as a partial portrait of what it means to grow up, useful for describing change but unable by itself to say what adulthood is for. Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields (2018) present similar theories in our textbook as descriptions of how adults develop. Fowler asks a further question: toward what end? A stage theory can tell me that a man in his forties often reviews his life, but it cannot tell me whether the new direction I choose is faithful or merely restless. For that, Fowler turns from psychology to theology.

Vocation as Partnership

Fowler (2000) answers with vocation, and he does not mean a career. Vocation, for Fowler, is the response a person makes with the whole self to God's call to partnership, a response that gathers up work, family, friendships, leisure and money and offers them for God's purposes and the good of neighbors. In this view, a person can have a vocation without a paid job, and a job is only one part of a vocation.

Fowler contrasts this picture with a cultural ideal of adulthood as self-fulfillment, in which the mature adult is the one who has become autonomous and realized personal potential. Vocation does not reject growth, but it changes its direction. The question shifts from "What do I want to become?" to "What am I being called to contribute?" Fowler also suggests that vocation brings a kind of freedom. If my life is a response to a call, I do not have to be everything, compete with every gifted person or measure my worth by comparison with others.

Reflection on My Own Season

This idea changed how I see my career change. Measured by Levinson's seasons, I am in a midlife transition, questioning a life structure that once fit. Measured by the self-fulfillment ideal, I am pursuing a more satisfying job. Fowler's account adds a third interpretation that feels truer: my years in law were not wasted, and this change is not an escape. They are two stages of one response. Fifteen years of listening to clients in crisis taught me patience and attention to detail, gifts that will serve counseling.

Paul's description of the church in Romans 12:4-8, as one body with members who have different gifts for different functions, supports this reading (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). It also relieves the anxiety of beginning late. If my contribution is one part among many, I do not need to catch up to twenty-five-year-old classmates; I need to offer what I have been given faithfully.

The idea also challenges me. Fowler's vocation includes my marriage, my time and my money, not only my work. I remarried two years ago, and graduate study takes evenings my wife and I once spent together. Vocation asks me to treat that relationship as part of my calling, not a cost of it, and to plan my studies with that in mind.

Conclusion

Fowler (2000) gave me language for something I had felt but could not explain. Developmental theories describe the seasons of adult life; vocation describes their purpose. Seen this way, my career change is neither a crisis nor a self-improvement project but a continuation of one calling in a new form. The practical result is a change in the question I bring to each decision about school, work and family. I used to ask whether a choice would make me happier. Now I try to ask whether it serves the partnership Fowler describes.

References

Cavanaugh, J. C., & Blanchard-Fields, F. (2018). Adult development and aging (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Fowler, J. W. (2000). Becoming adult, becoming Christian: Adult development and Christian faith (Rev. ed.). Jossey-Bass.