As my first official Ooze book bloggers review, I read Hokey Pokey: Curious People Finding What Life’s All About by Matthew Paul Turner.

Hokey Pokey is about calling and life’s stories and Turner’s take on where and when the two shall meet. The work seems to be targeted at folks trying to figure out their vocational lives or who enjoy looking back at a previous vocational muddle. Though Turner’s work is far from academic and a bit touchy-feely for me, he does approach vocation from several angles and discusses it in fairly wide-ranging ways.

For Turner, vocation is not about one specific path that God has for you, nor even about one’s occupation, but about how one lives one’s entire life. Fair enough. He emphasizes the importance of asking questions, staying open to new possibilities, and that questions of vocation can be quite tricky.

Throughout the work, Turner tells longish anecdotes about himself or others, describes interviews with others on vocation, and asks discussion questions to the reader.

I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. Turner’s more surface level approach and clunky writing just didn’t do anything for me. He’s got some good humor in there, but also some theology that makes me a bit squirmy.

If someone came to me with vocational questions, I’d recommend Parker Palmer’s “Let Your Life Speak” long before Turner’s Hokey Pokey, but perhaps he’s writing to a different audience than I’m used to. He comes from a more conservative evangelical background, and seems to take on questions from this perspective rather than mine in the liberal mainline.

Hokey Pokey isn’t quite what life’s all about and it’s not a grand read, but it does take on important questions regarding vocation. Writing a book on vocation is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades, but perhaps a close miss is well enough.