“Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deepest need.”

Frederick Buechner

In 2016, I was coming to the end of a five-year, very bumpy career transition. I wanted to return to pastoral work, serving the church full-time. But door after door closed and it seemed God was frustrating my plans. Because we were in the middle of launching our kids, I felt forced to go full-time with my carpentry skills while I finished up my doctorate.

Discouraged and at a particularly low point in March of that year, I “just happened” to do a job for a seasoned Methodist pastor who recommended Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Josey Bass, 2000) by Parker Palmer. Although it was a short read, I found it full of wisdom, gentle correction, and hope. Below are my favorite quotes. And I pray that there’s something there that not only reminds you that you’re fearfully and wonderfully made, but also gives you practical direction in whatever you need right now.

• Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear… not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received. (4)
• The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. (7)
• “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: “Why were you not Zusya?’” (11) – Rabbi Zusya
• I was disappointed in myself for not being tough enough to take the flak, disappointed and ashamed. But as pilgrims must discover if they are to complete their quest, we are led to truth by our weaknesses as well as our strengths. (22)
• Vocation at its deepest level is, “This is something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand it myself but that are nonetheless compelling. (25)
• Another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations—projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves—and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits. (29)
• Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. (30)
• The movements that transform us, our relations, and our worlds emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood. (31)
• Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled: But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest need. (36)
• There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does—maybe more. (39)
• Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials. (41)
• When I consistently refuse to take no for an answer, I miss the vital clues to my identity that arise when way closes—and I am more likely both to exceed my limits and to do harm to others in the process. (43)
• Despite the American myth, I cannot be or do whatever I desire—a truism, to be sure, but a truism we often defy.  Our created nature makes us like organisms in an ecosystem: there are some roles and relationships in which we thrive and others in which we wither and die. (44)
• It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that gift to everyone who asks me for it. There are some relations in which I am capable of love and others in which I am not. To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of the person in need—all in the name of love… that kind of giving is not only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to another except through me. (47-48)
• All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality. (54)

If we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon. (105)