Faith & Vocation: Mark Ellefson

As part of a year long project focused on faith and vocation we are highlighting various parishioners by having them answer seven questions.

Meet Mark Ellefson!

How long have you been in Seattle and what do you most enjoy and struggle with about living here?

I was born and raised in Seattle. I came of age in the 1970s when Seattle was economically depressed, a very different place than it is today. Debbie and I were married here and our children were born here. In the early 1990s we moved to the Tri-Cities for work and more affordable place to raise five children. After 30 years there, we returned to Seattle in 2023.

I love Seattle. Though it has changed from the Seattle of my youth, it still retains much of the character I love. I love the mountains, the Sound, Lake Washington and ferries. I appreciate what remains of my Scandinavian heritage here, and I also appreciate the many newer immigrants who enrich our community. I love the food scene, from Dicks to Canlis (Canlis not very often) and everything in between. I even love the rain.

I really don’t struggle with much living here. I mean, traffic is horrible, but now that I have retired I just avoid being on the during busy hours as much as possible.

How long have you been at your current place of work and do you see this as a place of longevity? Why or why not?

I have to depart from the script a bit here because I retired a year and a half ago. This does not mean that I no longer have a vocation, but my new vocation is quite different, at a slower pace, and much more flexible. I’ll first talk about my past vocation, then at the end share a few thoughts about my sense of post-career vocation.

Before retiring, I had worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory in Richland. It was a place of longevity for me; I worked there for over 20 years and never thought about leaving. It was a great organization and I enjoyed all of the varied roles I filled there.

Do you see your calling and your career as the same or different?

Somewhere in between. Since my late teens, care for the environment has been important to me, and seemed consistent with a Christian ethic stewardship of creation. Throughout my career, my work was in the environmental field, so there was real consistency between calling and career in that sense. At the same time, day-to-day work often involved tasks that seemed pretty tangential to actually protecting the environment or remediating past environmental contamination.

What are some of the things that you find most enjoyable about your work?

A couple of things come to mind. First, I completed a number of projects that required digging deeply into historical documents to understand and characterize environmental contaminants, mostly the radioactive stuff at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I really enjoyed the search for relevant information and putting together the pieces to form a coherent picture of the problem. It was detective work, lots of fun.

The second is more people-oriented. I dislike confusing, difficult, chaotic work processes. And I liked fixing them, or at least improving them. Often this involved pretty mundane work, like writing a detailed procedure or developing a spreadsheet that made a calculation easy and reliable. But I found this rewarding because it made my co-workers lives less frustrating and more productive.

What do you find particularly challenging?

This is going to sound terrible, but… people. I am by nature both a people pleaser and highly motivated toward excellence in work. It was challenging to navigate between these two motivations when there was disagreement with coworkers, when a task was done poorly, etc.

How do you see your faith intersecting with your work?

In many ways, but mostly in how I worked and related to others. Sometimes it was asking God for breakthroughs when I was just stuck on a project or task. Often I asked for God’s strength to take the more difficult path on a project, to do it really well rather than just enough to get by, or to take on a challenge that others were not interested in. And often I needed God’s wisdom in relationships with others.

I’ll give an example. In the last several years of my work, I was negotiating a permit with our state regulatory agency that we needed to continue operations. The entire negotiation process was difficult, but at one point we were at a complete impasse on an issue, and after many meetings the disagreements with the agency staff became kind of personal. I had to go to the Lord to first examine my own motives, try to understand the motives of the agency staff and to pray for them, and pray for a breakthrough. I believe that the Lord answered the prayer as the agency staff offered different approach that allowed us to find a common solution. And more importantly, that was a turning point in the whole negotiation process. Our work after that was much more conciliatory and productive.

If there was something the church could do to support you more, what might that look like?

I think the church needs to articulate the value of vocation and a good theology of vocation. For most of my life, the church simply didn’t mention vocation at all, or at best we were to be honest and witness to our co-workers. This fall our Harbor group is reading “A Prayer in the Night” by Tish Harrison-Warren. Writing about Jesus’ vocation as a carpenter she writes, “…God became flesh and built some furniture.” That is funny, but also profound. God works. and when he came into the world, it was not beneath him to build furniture (or whatever it was he made). Our work, then, is important, whether it’s exciting or mundane. When the church simply acknowledges that work is important - that the work itself is important and how I work is important - it completely changes my perspective. (BTW I think Casey and Harbor are doing this well.)

Do you still have a sense of vocation now in retirement?

Yes, but not in the sense I experienced it during my career. I have not found a single, driving passion to throw myself into, a sort of second career. But there are a couple of things that feel very much like God’s call to me in this time of life. The first is to attend to some areas of my inner life in preparation for the physical (and maybe mental) limits I will experience as I age. I have seen some people age well and others become self-centered and miserable. I want to finish well. I know, given my natural disposition and family history, it is going to take some work, growing in prayer, acceptance, gratitude, etc. I’m trying to use these days to read and grow in prayer and related disciplines to that end.

The second “vocation” is simply to be attentive to the Lord in the many, small things that currently make up my days and weeks. This includes time with our children and granddaughters, volunteering at the tool library, prayer walks, baking bread, practicing hospitality, etc. I do think that the Lord may direct me into new areas of service but, for me at least, the need is to be faithful and attentive to the people and tasks that are right in front of me. That is in contrast to frantically trying to find something that will give me a sense of significance, which is a strong pull in early retirement.