Your life is your ministry

Inside the front cover of Anita’s book Secrets in the Dark by Frederick Buechner, she wrote some notes. This one jumped out at me this morning:

11/27/06

You have only one decision to make: to follow God or not.

If you choose to follow God, you cannot fail.

Your life is your ministry.

It’s no secret and no surprise that Anita chose to lead by example. She chose deed over word when it came to fighting stereotypes, for the rights of the small guys, for the souls of her loved ones. Her character was revealed with every action – and humble omission.

Much of Buechner’s book deals with your life, or rather the life that God has designed for you. Will you recognize it? Will you accept it? Chapter six is about listening to God and finding His calling for you. Here are some of the passages that Anita highlighted.

…our vocation is our calling. It is the work that we are called to do in this world, the thing that we are summoned to spend our lives doing. We can speak of ourselves as choosing our vocations, but perhaps it is at least as accurate to speak of our vocations choosing us, of a call’s being given and lives our hearing it, or not hearing it. And maybe that is the place to start: the business of listening and hearing.

[In high school] there were students who had a real flair, a real talent, for something. … Yet now, a good many years later, I have the feeling that more than just a few of them are spending their lives at work in which none of these gifts is being used, at work they seem to be working at with neither much pleasure not any sense of accomplishment.

When you are young, I think, your hearing is in some ways better than it is ever going to be again. You hear better than most people the voices that call to you out of yoru own life to give yourself to this work or that work. When you are young, before you accumulate responsibilities, you are freer than most people to choose among all the voices and to answer the one that Speaks most powerfully to who you are and to what you really want to do with your life. But the danger is that there are so many voices and they all in their ways sound so promising. The danger is that you will not listen to the voice that speaks to you…but instead your listen tot he great blaring, boring, banal voice of our mass culture, which threatens to deafen us all by blasting forth that the only thing that really matters about your work is how much it will get you in he way of salary and status, and that if it is gladness you are after, you can save that for weekends.

The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in a life’s work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realizing someday that they have spent the only years that they are ever going to get in this world doing something that could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else.

There is nothing moralistic or sentimental about this truth. It means for us simply that we must be careful with our lives, for Christ’s sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously. Everybody knows that. We need no one to tell it to us. Yet in another way perhaps we do always need to be told, because there is always the temptation to believe that we have all the time in the world, whereas the truth of it is that we do not. We have only one life, and the choice of how we are going to live it mys be our own choice, not one that we let the world make for us. Because surely Marquand [author of Point of No Return] was right that for each of us there comes a point of no return, a point beyond which we no longer have life enough left to go back and start all over again.

I was very blessed to find my calling in my 20s. It was evident that I was built to serve children – and so I became a stay at home dad, youth soccer coach, substitute teacher and – one day in the future – a full time teacher. Meanwhile, Anita struggled to find her calling. Even before she started her first full time job as a lawyer, she told me, “None of this feels right,” but she had few other options at that point and took what she thought was the best path.

Fast forward seven years and Anita was in a full blown “meaning of life” dilemma. I think what she really had was a “meaning of career” dilemma, where her principles did not align with those of her job. Her own principles remained the same through her life – and her relationships and decisions reflected them. Certainly, her life was her ministry and it affected a great many people. Sometimes she struggled to see the good she was doing with her life as she was focused on her career and business. But her own business did reflect her principles and ultimately touched people just as deeply as her personal relationships.