Book sharing - Wonderfully and Fearfully Made

My sharing in Nov 2009 Issue of Unjournal, Vocatio Creatio

Book sharing of Let Your Life Speak – Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer (San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 2000)

 

“What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?” are no doubt the questions that most of us have raised in search of our identities at adolescent stage. To some or many of us, these are the questions we may raise again when we tick the box of the thirties’ group after we have worked for a few years.  Many may ponder the questions, but only a few may take up the courage to discover and reclaim the gracious gifts they already received, and courageously live their lives in congruence with the way they are fearfully and wonderfully made, in the Creator’s image.

With the same questions in mind, Palmer candidly leads us onto his pathway of seeking his vocation in his early thirties.  By sharing his mistakes – the wrong turns he made, misreading of his true identity and his pain and depression in the journey, I found a teacher and a real person whose words of wisdom brought me comfort, encouragement and inner conviction from God that He was asking me to search for His calling to me.  I also encountered a friend, who was able to side with me and echo my heart in my journey.

Frederick Buechner (quoted by Palmer) defines vocations as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need”.  Palmer explained that vocation begins “not in the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth be the gifts that God created”.  He also shared from his own experience that vocation “does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”  It calls for listening to “truth and values at the core of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live”. It calls for unveiling the masks behind the heroes that I try to imitate and piercing through my ego to be the person God created me to be from birth. 

The guidance is from within. Our stories give all clues about us, from our birth, throughout our lives, including all the success and shattered dreams, strength and weakness, emotions and intellect, potentials and limitations. It is in embracing our whole being that we can discover our greatest desire and “true vocation joins service”. That is how we can serve the world with the gifts we received and how our gladness can meet the needs of the world.

The book opened my heart to the term “vocation” as God does not call me or you to do everything which is simply a fallacy. No one is the same as we are all wonderfully and fearfully made. The gift of true self is not forced onto us to become someone we are not meant to be but lavishly given to us by His unforced rhythm of grace and love, waiting patiently for us to “recover and reclaim” what we are meant to be.