Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances.

First, I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think—an activity I greatly value—but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground.

We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. Only as we do so can we discover the community of our lives.

One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one's selfhood and resisting things that do not.

The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self‐sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy.

The knowledge I am talking about is not intellectual and analytical but integrative and of the heart, and the choices that lead to wholeness are not pragmatic and calculated, intended to achieve some goal, but simply and profoundly expressive of personal truth.

Vocation at its deepest level is not, “Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing.” Vocation at its deepest level is, “This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that ar

True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.”3

I am gathering my observations in a letter. When my granddaughter reaches her late teens or early twenties, I will make sure that my letter finds its way to her, with a preface something like this: “Here is a sketch of who you were from your earliest days in this world. It is not a definitive picture—only you can draw that. But it was sketched by a