I’ve been meaning to go over what I highlighted in Parker Palmer’s book, Let Your Life Speak, for days now. Ben recommended it to me quite some time ago and he was right. I got a lot out of reading it!!
Parker Palmer is a Quaker and seem to me to be a bit more mystically based than Howard Macy. Macy is a bit more snug in his orthodoxy. For whatever reason, I’m always far more comfortable with those who aren’t so comfortable, and Palmer definitely isn’t a preacher of comfort! 
Palmer tells us: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have intended to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
Not so easy to do, is it? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been encouraged to set short term and long term goals for as long as I can remember, and this was done with what I wanted to achieve in mind. I don’t ever remember being encouraged to listen to my life. Just the opposite! I was taught to take control of my life.
Of course, here I am, 46 years old, and that hasn’t exactly worked for me. I mean, it would be nice if I was in control. But the older I get, the more I realize that “control” is a sort of modern pathology. We’ve been coming at it completely backwards for years!
Palmer says that Frederick Buechner defines vocation as “the place where your deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest needs.”
Could you even imagine having that which makes you glad meet the deepest needs of the world? Is that even possible? I don’t know about you, but I live in a world where the vocation of most people has far more to do with simply getting by than meeting personal gladness with the needs of the world! What a concept! But somewhere in you, doesn’t it sort of resonate as true? The systems of our world are falling apart because they no longer provide meaning. Life hardly seems worth living if what is ultimately meaningful to us doesn’t likewise meet some deep need within the world.
Palmer tells us that “our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing.”
I tend to think of myself as uneducated. Yet I have a degree n Education from one of the more prominent schools in Texas. I suppose I should be proud of it, but I’m not. It didn’t take much to get the degree. I didn’t even really have to show up to classes. But since then, I’ve been studying my butt off, simply because I’m interested in the subject. People frequently tell me they are intimidated by me because I am far more educated than they are, and this always flabergasts me, because I don’t have much of formal education at all. (Being taught to teach secondary education in the public school system is a trade – not an actual education.) What education I have has been primarily self-taught and I don’t have any degrees to show for it. But since the time I was 9 years old, I’ve been exploring theology, simply because I find it fascinating. And I do tend to take my knowledge for granted. I tend to think that what I know, everyone knows. Yet, I am told repeatedly that I have a way of presenting things that would otherwise be very difficult for them to understand.
So – it makes me wonder? Did I pursue a degree in education because I was telling my life what I wanted to do with it? Or because my life was telling me what it wanted to do with me? I’m not sure the distinction is so easily determined!
Palmer says: “My anxiety about way not opening, the anxiety that kept me pounding on closed doors, almost presented me from seeing the secret hidden in plain sight; I was already standing on the ground of my new life, ready to take the next step on my journey, if only I would turn around and see the landscape that lay before me.”
Palmer says, “We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer – and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives.”
I guess that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve been reluctantly accepting the “no” and not it’s time to take the “yes”.