Hi, Ladies. I am loving your comments about how you'd like the blog to be shaped more and more around you and your input. (Speaking of that, if you haven't posted a comment saying what you like most about the blog, what doesn't work for you, and how you'd like to see yourselves more involved, please do that. It's super helpful). Your ideas are already in the works, and I love how things are shaking out.
I've had an additional idea that came to me, actually, when I was thinking about our own Miss Crystal and the profound influence she has had on my life. (For those of you who haven't seen pix of her here before, here she is. Beautiful lady.) In so many ways she's a role model for me, even though she's ten years younger than I am. I decided that from time to time, I'll write posts about other women I meet who could be role models for you in this process of spiritual growth. It's one thing for me to go on (sometimes ad nauseam!) about how to give up freaking out, but if I can show you how another young woman is actually doing it, it just seems like that would be incredibly helpful.
So I'm going to start with a young woman I met at the spiritual retreat I went on week before last. She was way younger than everyone else there -- where the average age was between 55 and 60 I think -- but she was so deep into her spiritual journey that I was like a sponge when I was around her. Her real name isn't Ivey but that's what I'm calling her for our purposes. The rest of the details are absolutely as they happened ( or at least as best I can remember them from our conversation)
Ivey went to college and then law school and took a job as a public defender in New York City. For those of you not familiar with that position, a public defender is a lawyer who defends people who are accused of crimes but can't afford their own attorney. Even a guilty person has the right to be treated fairly in court, and Ivey's job was to make sure that happened, guilty or not.
She worked in that job for 8 years and somewhere along the line she began to feel that this wasn't the job she was supposed to do for the rest of her life. So she saved up enough money to live on for a year and took 12 months off to try to discern what God wants her to do next. Two of the things that happened during that year were: (1) she became involved with an amazing church in Queens, New York, that does awesome, creative things to meet the needs of the people who flock there and (2) she spent some time at a convent in Wisconsin. The sisters there were so taken with the depth of her journey they invited her to come back and spend a year with them and learn about deep prayer. So Ivey has been working for the church for about six months as the director of contemplative art (how cool does THAT sound?) and in the fall, she'll go to the convent to spend a year with the sisters.
She doesn't know what's at the end of that year. The point really is to let God show her that, which can only happen if she has a deep and focused relationship with God. Her eyes shine when she talks about it (she is, by the way, an exquisitely beautiful young woman because of that) and there is no trace of fear on her face. Her approach: why wouldn't God reveal her purpose to her?
Oh, one more thing. Ivey is now 36 years old.
Okay so in case you didn't catch it, Ivey did not know age 14, 15, 16, 17, or even 25 just exactly what her life was going to be about. I didn't find out precisely when she started looking only to God for direction, but even if it was before she went to law school, while that was an important season in her life, it didn't turn out to be set in stone. One of the things she did say was that she's glad she has no other personal responsibilities -- no husband, no kids, no house payment, no credit card debt -- because right now she is as free as she can possibly be to follow where God takes her.
As I've read and studied your comments about the things that really worry you when it comes to the future, two things have struck me:
* You so long to be obedient to God and to do God's will. It's important to you to find your purpose so you'll know what directon to go in
* You're afraid you're going to miss it. How do you KNOW what God's will is for you? Do you have what it takes to carry it out once you do find it?
Basically you want to be obedient, right? And you would be if God would just TELL YOU WHAT TO DO!
As God would have it, just today I had lunch with an amazing woman -- another of my role models -- who explained to me that if we go WAY back to the original definition of the word "obey" it means "to go toward the sound of." If we obey God, we go toward the sound of God that we hear.
It DOESN'T mean "figure out what God wants and do it whether you like it or not." In the first place, if your parents want you to obey them, they tell you what they expect, yes? God wants us to obey so obviously God is saying something.
And it DOESN'T mean "wait until God spells out the whole thing in a huge revelaton and then go do it." Seriously, does your math teacher spend the first month of the semester non-stop talking about everything you're going to have to know and THEN give you the assignments and toss you out there on your own? (If he or she does that, report him to the principal ASAP!)
What it DOES mean is, go in the direction of the sound you're hearing. That's what Ivey did. That's all anybody can do, really, if she wants to know her God-purpose. And the sounds are released on a need-to-know basis. God may not be revealing whether you're going to be a career dancer or a writer or a missionary to Haiti. But the preparatory steps are probably being laid out for you even as we speak. And how do you hear what they are?
You listen.
The whispers will come to you in so many forms:
* The desire of your heart -- your real heart -- way deep down beneath your ego and your drive for perfection and your need to please everybody and their sister -- down in the truest part of yourself. When people say, "What if God wants me to spend my life doing something I hate?" I just want to say, "What God do you know? My loving Father doesn't condemn people to lives of misery -- are you kidding me?" Really. Who put that desire there in the first place?
* Your gifts and talents. This gets tricky with sports and the arts because in the big picture how many people make their living as best selling authors and female athletes and blockbuster actresses? But do you have to be an Academy Award winner or an Olympic medalist endorsing Nikes to be using your gifts? One thing I know for sure: they aren't there to be wasted. You have them for a reason.
* The opportunities that arise. That could be anything from a former pro soccer player moving in next door to a full blown scholarship, from a "chance" invitation to a lecture that totally blows your socks off to pet sitting for your neighbors and discovering you have a sense for business.
* The encouragement of an adult. I've told several of you privately that I think you have what it takes to make writing at least part of your career. Others of you might hear from somebody you trust that you have an exceptional way with young children or an inborn gift for leadership or the heart of a teacher.
* Nudges. You know, when it feels like God is poking you in the ribs and saying, "Are you paying attention? Are you seeing this?"
Those are mostly external signs. We'll talk more about the internal ones in future posts. For right now, I think this is enough to "obey" for now. That's the way God works, at least in my experience. Baby steps. Small doses. A building of trust, one block at a time.
If you want to comment -- and I totally hope you do -- tell us about a recent whisper you've had, a sound you need to move toward in some small way. If you don't think you've had one, sit down and journal about the last week and see what you discover. God is pretty much talking to us all the time, I think because we only catch about 1% of it so God has to pour it on. Tell us what you hear, what you can move toward. That's obedience.
Blessings,
Nancy Rue