A vocation to spread sunshine

Career and vocation are words often used interchangeably, but as Sarah Attalla ’23 discovered through the Living Well Center at Lenoir-Rhyne, they refer to drastically different ideas. If a career is what a person does as their life’s work, vocation is why they do it.

“My career goal is physical therapy. It’s what led me to major in exercise science, and it’s what I want to study in grad school,” Attalla explained. “But vocation is about purpose, God’s purpose for me, and for me, that is to be the sunshine on a rainy day for other people.”

During her junior year, Attalla received an email from the Living Well Center describing a new program granting a few students funds for an individual project designed to explore their vocation. Attalla was one of four students accepted into the program and started a journey of self-discovery.

“We would meet once every other week in the Living Well Center in the Rhyne Building and just talk about what was going on in our lives and where we felt God was leading us,” Attalla shared.

“One of the activities we did involved choosing three words we felt really resonated with us, and my three were kindness, family and joy. Then we had to think about the ways to bring those words into our daily lives. For me, it was about spreading happiness and joy.”

In practice, for Attalla spreading that joy came down to helping others. Through the Lohr Learning Commons, she worked as a peer tutor and academic advisor for other students, sharing advice to manage the workload of college, balancing academics with social life.

“You’d sit down with peers and have conversations. I’d ask questions such as, ‘What are you going through? How can I help you manage this or that?’ I loved to help others any way I can.”

She also worked with the Engaged Scholars program doing community service projects in Hickory and Catawba County.

“We worked with a local group on a project to provide backpacks for kids. Whatever they needed — clothing, food, school supplies — we put into the backpacks and distributed them,” said Attalla.

While the Learning Commons and Engaged Scholars gave Attalla avenues to help others, her project with the Living Well Center showed her the importance of caring for herself, refilling her reserves of energy, compassion and joy so she could continue to pursue her vocation of bringing the sunshine to rainy days.

Attalla’s interest in physical therapy began with a back injury in high school. She worked with physical therapists then to ease her pain and restore her mobility to continue athletics.

“When I was doing physical therapy, I loved what my therapists stood for, how they helped others live without pain. We take for granted the simplicity of not being in pain, so it hit home for me and connected to my vocation so seamlessly,” she said.

At Lenoir-Rhyne, Attalla chose exercise science as the most obvious path to a career in physical therapy. Thanks to her own therapy, she spent a year on the triathlon team and joined the weightlifting club team, but her back injury troubled her from time to time.

“When I was thinking about how to use the funding from the Living Well Center, I looked at ways to use it for a project to help others,” Attalla said. “In the conversations we had, they suggested I use it to do something for myself, something to help me so I could continue to help others.”

In the end, Attalla’s discoveries through the Living Well Center led her to buy a stationary bicycle, which connected to both her vocation and career goals.

“It’s not exciting, but my own physical therapists told me the best thing I could do for my back is to get on a bike,” she explained. “If God’s purpose is for me to help others, I can’t tell others to do something that I’m not willing to do for myself.”