Small Things

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Like most boys, I had a string of answers for this growing up:  a fireman, a stuntman, President of the United States. As I grew older, my list was refined, but one thing remained constant:  I have focused on what I want to be, and have almost completely neglected what I want to do.  I have attended to the titles and positions I want to attain without any clear notion of what I would do once I got there.  Worse still, while thinking "grand thoughts" about what I might be, I have often neglected to do those things that are already right in front of me. 

Shane Claiborne quotes Mother Theresa as saying, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."  Maybe this is part of what she meant.  

I am embarrassed that it is taking me so long to begin to learn this lesson: All I am ever given is the thing that's in front of me. It changes everything to ask the question, "What small thing can I do now? What small way can I practice loving well?"-- regardless of position, or title, or what anyone else thinks of me.

So instead of position or a grandness scale, the discipline to my thinking would be something like, "If there is not a concrete and loving action I can take in regard to x thought, skip it and move on until I can envision something concrete and loving, no matter how small."

I bet that needs a lot of refining, but I'm going to post it anyhow.

Calling: A Definition

Os Guiness writes:

Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.   - The Call.

Everything we are. Everything we do. Everything we have. That sounds really inviting to me.

Two additional thoughts for now:

• "God call us to himself so decisively..."  It is incredibly uplifiting and incredibly humbling to consider that God would call us-- Not just in the general "sure, everyone" sense, but in the "I knit you together in your mother's womb" sense. Who am i that He would call? And what have I done to respond?
• "Everything..." I get so myopically focused on calling as career, that I fail to see the rest of everything: Husband, Father, Son, Brother, person who likes reading advice columns...  It explodes the question the question from "What will I be when I grow up?" to "What will I be and how is that reflected in all that I do?"
  

Pausing to begin

As students at a small elite college in the east, my friends and I talked a lot about vocation and calling. My heart and imagination were fired by the notion that all of us have an overriding purpose in life. I was taught and believed that finding and living in that purpose is a key to a productive and worthwhile life. So I set out from college to find my purpose in life, to make my mark on the world, to see what I could do. In the headiness of graduation and with no small measure of arrogance, I imagined that somehow life would come calling, that I would up and do great things or be a part of great movements.

Except, it hasn't turned out that way. After college, I got a job, changed jobs, changed jobs again (and again). I got married, had kids. I vote regularly, keep abreast of the news, pay my taxes, go to church on Sundays, and generally try to live a decent life. And it is a good life, really.  I love my wife and adore my kids; I have friends and family who love me; I've got a job that pays the bills. And yet...

Nearing middle age, I find myself still waiting for life to begin. At the point in my career when I should be "hitting my stride," I don't know what I want to do when I grow up. I have this gnawing sense that I'm not firing on all cylinders, that I could be doing something more. (More what? Productive? Meaningful?) And I still want to believe that at the intersection of my gifts and the needs of the world around me, there is that for which I was made.  I suspect that I have missed something along the way.

So I plan to explore that here. I want to reflect on questions about life and vocation, examine choices I have made and am making, try to connect dots that have been in front of my face all along, and maybe stumble upon something useful. I anticipate the blog format to help add discipline to the process. And I hope, perhaps, that others will benefit from these questions and reflections-- and that I will benefit from other eyes seeing and pointing out pieces that would otherwise remain hidden to me.

So here's to calling and a prayer for ears to hear.