Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

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.

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

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

I had to be forced underground before I could understand that the way to God is not up but down.

If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer—if we are unfaithful to true self.

In the face of our deep divides, we seem to think that the way to connect is to avoid the particularities of our lives and speak in abstractions, reaching into the stratosphere for generalizations no one can disagree with. But that doesn't work—at intellectual altitudes like that, the air is too thin to breathe. If we want to connect as human being

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.

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

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

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