Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

saying, "Let your life speak."

Then I ran across the old Quaker

we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confidentand proud of.

Today I understand vocation quite differently-not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It

we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots.

Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?"'=

the words we speak often contain counsel we are trying to give ourselves.

there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self.