Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail-and may even do great damage.Vocation,

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

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow.

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling the who I am. I

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.

"Ask me whether what I have done is my life." For

I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life,

"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

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