Visioning....

I'm reading "Visioneering..." by Andy Stanley.  There's nothing quite like reading a book about the process of visioning to make you think about your future and the direction your life is going.    The reasons why you do some things and not others also come up for contemplation.

It affirms the place where I find myself today, but in terms of Spiritual strategic planning, it makes me think about where I would find myself in 5 years.   It makes me listen to the nudges that I sense and to start praying over them.

Is it possible that I have a different destination to set off toward after I reach the one to which I am currently underway.   Maybe that's what this "waiting" is all about.  To sit in the quiet and take out the map and just look at other places people travel to.

While I sit in the quiet, there are also questions I have to answer: How long will my board term last? Will I renew my term? How long will I work at the church? At the school? What if other jobs come up?  At the school?  Outside the school?  Should I go back to school?   ....and so I just wait some more and wait for the questions to settle and sort themselves out.  One's brain could get tired.   And God holds it in His Hands.  He'll let me know when I need to know.    I just have to make sure I stay available.

Just a few days ago I had to decide about my board term.  Doing something like that makes you take an honest look at yourself.   I shared "It's neat to trace the path when I look at the "tools" that I find in my "toolbox": How the little things gave way to bigger things and how I find myself where I am today, doing the things I do. And I love what I am doing these days." I can't wait to delve into the tedious things of the campaign, after we get all the document writing out of the way."

So I look at the myriad of things that are on my list of things to do.   It's really busy, but today I am enjoying the challenge.  I look at all the different little things that are included in my job description and that somewhere along the line I was equipped for them.  Amazing how, unbeknownst to me, God was preparing me and has prepared me for this.  That I have certain interests and certain tendencies.   It makes me a firm believer that God creates us all for something special and He knows exactly what He's doing.  Never in a million years would I have envisioned this for myself but I've always known that He has a plan, a vision for my life.  When we make ourselves available, even when we're not sure where He's going with all of this, He will take us and continue to make us into the person He intends us to be.  He needs us to fill a special purpose.  Reminds of the apple post. 

I  was reading something by Frederick Buechner the other day about how your calling also shapes you to be the person God intends you to be and how wonderful it is when your vocation/calling touches what really moves you, your gladness.…

"Maybe that means that the voice we should listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice that we might think we should listen to least, and that is the voice of our own gladness. What can we do that makes us gladdest, what can we do that leaves us with the strongest sense of sailing true North and of peace, which is much of what gladness is? Is it making things with our hands out of wood or stone or paint on canvas? Or is it making something we hope like truth out of words? Or is it making people laugh or weep in a way that cleanses their spirit? I believe that if that is a thing that makes us truly glad, then it is a good thing and it is our thing and it is the calling voice that we were made to answer with our lives."  (The Hungering Dark)

Cool.

I guess its neat to sit and think about it and even neater when you figure some of it out...


"Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits".  Satchel Paige

Who Am I and How Did I Get Here?

How do you tell someone, who doesn't know you, just who you are?
What do you include and what do you leave out?
Oh, I definitely know what I would leave out! 

I suppose it makes a big difference who your audience might be.    If I was sharing who I am with a boss type person, I might include different things then if I was telling my Teen Challenge Student about myself.   My friends know who I am.  I like to think I'm an open book.   I also like to think I'm easy to read, but at times feel like I might be a bit of enigma.  Maybe they have to be good at reading between the lines sometimes.     

Actually, maybe it doesn't really matter who I am...it's not about me. And I know how I got here, besides the whole birds and the bees thing.....   I'm really blessed.  All the good things in my life are straight from God's hand, His fingerprints on my life.  And the tough things?...well,  He has brought me through those things because I am in His hands.   The challenges are things that draw me closer and make me more dependent on God.    The callings are opportunities and invitations to use my gifts to bless others but I know I will be so blessed in return.  That's always how it turns out.  

It feels like I'm on the way somewhere and not simply underway.    I can be content in not knowing the exact destination because I have a great Guide and great traveling companions.   Often we know the next step, but sometimes we have to wait for the timing to be right to keep walking. Maybe there is someone we have to talk to who is not on this journey yet.   Maybe you are supposed to meet up with someone somewhere along the way.  Let's say you just happen to share something that is on your heart and you find out that the person beside you shares the same burden with you (that happened today....four of us even!!!). And sometimes the only reason we have to wait is for the conditions to be right to see a spectacular sunset around the next bend.  Waiting time is never wasted time.

So who am I?

I'm an ordinary walker...just like you.   

And we'll get there....

Where Shall We Go Today...

There is this delightful silence around me.  

I'm "hearing" so many intense sounds but mostly I am hearing a feeling.   It sounds like....wait.    For a while I've felt a driving feeling but it is not accompanied by a sense of  direction.  It's hard for me not to respond to momentum:it's like knowing you are going on a trip and so you pack but you don't know where you are going.   You could set out hoping that by leaving you are at least on your way somewhere.   How futile!  The best thing to do is the sit by the door with your bags packed....ready to go at a moments notice.   

I'm not that good at sitting around. 

I'm ready to roll.   

Timmies

The blizzard is dying down.  This one came unexpected, out of nowhere.  No media hype.  Or could it be that this media hermit missed the hype.  It's possible.   I know...I can't believe either.

This is Canada.  We have snow.  It comes regularly, sometimes suddenly, and often in large quantities.   I must admit that I arrived at my love for winter late in life, possibly only in this last decade.    I felt a bit "gyped" last year, when we only received one substantial load.  I love this "white season" and went to bed with a "I hope it's a snow day tomorrow" feeling.

We did some shoveling.  We cleared our driveway, a neighbor called and Craig shoveled there, after which Craig went to a friends house, and Joe and I shoveled at church.  This is what snow days often look like around here.   New this time :a tractor trailer broke down half way up the street and had to be towed out of there, the mailman brought a parcel for Joe, but said he got stuck on some ice a couple of side streets over.   It appears that the plows are so busy keeping the main drag open and free of ice that they haven't gotten around to the subdivisions.  This is quite typical.  The neighbors are alive and well, and the air is filled with the hum of their snowblowers.  (I think the timing is a little off on one of them).

To celebrate and reward ourselves Canadian style, we stopped in at Tim Hortons for a treat.   And...we rolled up the rim...my head is not stuck so far into the sand that the latest Roll-Up-The-Rim campaign has escaped my notice.   (I did get out earlier this week :)   I get to play again.   I always get to play again. We sat in the store.  My double-double, my blueberry fritter, Joe, his real lemon iced tea , frosted cinnamon roll, and I.  Someone else got the last honey cruller. Coffee never tastes quite as good as when it's well deserved: you've put in the hours, heaved the heavy stuff, and it's 3 o'clock.   

And then the old fellows trickle in.   You know who I'm talking about.   They gather there everyday.   They nod to the other fellows already at their table as they walk in.  The girls know their orders because they are "regulars", and they know the girls.  They wear farm hats and work coats and sit down just within earshot.   They talk about the tsunami,  the price of gas, the snow and how it's making their angina act up.   They talk about it everyday, and everyday they solve the world's problems around those little tables with the collective wisdom of their generation.  Which ever problems they aren't able to solve that day get blamed on the proper "powers that be", and that too brings resolution.  I think this was the most Canadian moment of the entire day. It's a tradition that happens several times every day like clock work in coffee shops, franchised and not, all over North America.     Having a treat after shoveling is a tradition too.   It's the small matter of embracing winter and celebrating life in a very simple way.  

Celebrating: a driveway well shoveled. 

When you can find joy in the little things ...you're going to find it abundantly.

Story

I attended a CLEAR lecture at Redeemer University College the other day.   "Books for Bookclubs"...it was planned months ago, before life had such a frenetic pace.     And there in the middle of the busyness was this beautiful quote by Frederick Buechner (from "The Dwarves in the Stable" from Telling Secrets (1991).

"Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.  If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually."

Sometimes the topics that I write about are just things that I need to "unpack" or "unravel", maybe to identify the loose ends in order to tie them up: Stories of who I am and where I come from and the people I meet along the way and what it looks like when we walk together.  Sometimes the loose ends are tidied, and sometimes they tie onto something else.   The neatest thing is when the loose ends are woven into someone else's story.