VOCATION

In his book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, Parker Palmer asks, “What am I meant to do?  What am I meant to be?” (2).  These questions are asked in the reality that many times we allow ourselves to live the life that is expected of us by significant others in our lives.  We live, but not true to who we are, what our life is about, or what it means for us to be who we are. 

Palmer directs us to a poem in which this statement is made: “Ask me whether what I have done is my life” (“Ask Me,” by William Stafford).  This statement has hit a tender spot in my life because I sometimes (often) wonder if I have ever really connected with the real me, the me created in the image of God, the me honestly seeking to live in response to that creation.  Many times I have asked “Who am I,” and “What is my life to be about,” and “How do I fit into the scheme of things?”  A thousand times I have asked, “What difference does it make that I am living or that I have lived in this world?”

As I look back at sixty-five years of being here I have wondered many times what Palmer articulates so well.   Have I not somehow stumbled into a way of being where “I had simply found a ‘noble’ way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart” (3).   

Parker Palmer has set me to thinking about myself, my life, my relation to the world in which I live, my relation to God.  I am wondering if maybe I have inadvertently lived a life of “distortion of my true self” (3).  I’m not sure I know how to process this “wondering,” but I do know that I long to live truthfully to what I have been created to be and to do.

Today I find myself at the beginning of a new season in my life where I am invited to be who I am; at least that’s how I feel about it.  In the days remaining to me I want to be extraordinarily intentional to listen to my life.  To put it another way, I want to be extraordinarily intentional to listen to the presence of God because Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you [in your midst] (Luke 17:21).

I feel like God is inviting me into a time of kingdom awareness, a time of drawing close to Him in the everyday and ordinary.  I believe the invitation has been there all along.  I have tried to walk in light of that invitation, and have to some degree, but I hunger to go deeper into the things of God.  I long for God to be God in me and in my life experiences.  I long to lay my questions, concerns, longings, and issues before Him in an honest and transparent relationship. 

I want to respond to the request, “Ask me whether what I have done is my life,” with a YES.  Yes, in Christ I have lived the life God designed in me to live.  I lived truthfully to the creative design of God in me.  Yes, I have allowed the fingerprints of God to be all over my life as He has shaped and formed me into the image of Christ in the spirit of the word which says, “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). 

I long to be one of those people of whom it can be said, “Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19).