Saturday, May 2, 2009

Vocation

There are no paragraph breaks in this post. Deal with it.

Antony asked me this weekend if I thought I'd found my vocation. "I'd say so." To which he responded, "but would you say that unprompted" Hesitated a little bit at that one. It's interesting but due to some combination of my very nomadic upbringing, my ENFP personality, and lingering insecurity I still have some serious issues with commitment. Referring to my job as my vocation still causes a bit of a shudder to run up my spine. The post-modernist in me just doesn't want to identify myself with one thing so specifically. That being said, if I was honest, I'd have to say that I have indeed found what I would consider to be my vocation. My hesitation to identify it as such has pretty much only kept me from giving 100% to what I was doing. Which is a little bit on the lame sauce side of things. My dad always used to say that "Excellence honors God" which I used to view as a fairly trite paring down of the gospel as I knew it. I'm coming to realize, though, that just because that's not the entirety of God's intent for our lives doesn't make it not true. I'm coming to value truth nuggets like that one. As much as I'd like to say otherwise, pursuing excellence in the things that God has placed in my path reveals a willingness on my part to trust in the fact that He doesn't have me in some sort of spiritual holding pattern. If He, in his sovereignty, has placed me where I'm at for a reason, maybe I should try to pursue His work for me in that place eagerly. Coming out of the Navy that's consistently been one of my largest struggles. When I was there I always thought of it as a go between, a gap filler in my life and never really sold out to the idea that I needed to look for where He was working around me in that area as much as I could. That never really happened until the very end. Now, in a place I love with a vocation I've grown to be really stoked about, it's time to get over it and dive in. Not so much with more time but with greater intentionality, prayer, and a willingness to surrender to the things that God has for me.

That's pretty stinking exciting.

2 comments:

benson said...

your lack of paragraph breaks disappoints me. :)

cool realization -- that is very exciting.

Tyler said...

You better be ready to dive right in. We got work to do.