From “Embracing Your Second Calling: Find Passion and Purpose for the Rest of Your Life” by Dale Hanson Bourke
In my almost comically predictable fashion, I decided to reassess my life and come up with a mission statement. So I went back to the books growing dusty on my shelf. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey had helped me set goals earlier in my career. I brushed it off and began to read it all over again. To my surprise, I couldn’t remember the book. It seemed to be saying something entirely different than it had before. In light of my new diet of Bible reading, I could no longer view it as a business book. When the book talked about putting “first things first,” I no longer say it as a way of organizing my to-do list. The principle to “be proactive” hit me like a splash of cold water. Being proactive was the opposite of being reactive. Although I might have believed I was being proactive in my life, I was mostly being reactive, which was one of my well-honed bad habits.
I also read Parker Palmer’s classic Let Your Like Speak. I remembered it to be about vocation, but when I reread it, the words seemed to be saying something else. “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be.” Taken against the backdrop of Scripture, this quote sounded remarkably like the test from Romans.
My friend Karen suggested that I read The Path by Laurie Beth Jones. It, too, seemed to speak about the whole of life, not just work. I walked through her exercise and began to feel like Bilbo Baggins, setting out on an epic adventure I couldn’t begin to understand. Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that I needed to decide what I wouldn’t do more than what I would do. I made some halting attempts at a mission statement and began to realize that work, as I knew it, was no longer central. When I truly understood this, it was both terrifying and deeply freeing. If I was to get back on the career track, it would have to be a totally different approach. I was no longer trying to build a resume.
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