The whole trajectory of my life changed and with it the lives of many, many other people. That program would turn out to be far more than a career move out of the transformation that took place there I became a writer, counselor, and speaker. I applied to graduate school to become a therapist, and got accepted. I set the volume down without turning another page and walked out of that bookstore to find a life worth living. Can a world of posers tell you to do anything but pose yourself? As Buechner said, we are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, “to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.” Reading the counsel Thurman gave to Bailie I knew it was God speaking to me. The scripts they handed me I simply could not bring myself to play for very long. I wanted someone else to tell me who to be. This is different from seeking counsel or advice what I wanted was freedom from responsibility and especially freedom from risk. All my life I had been asking the world to tell me what to do with myself. Suddenly my life up till that point made sense in a sickening sort of way I realized I was living a script written for me by someone else. It could have been Balaam’s donkey, for all I was concerned. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. In the introduction to the book that I rose to this day, the author, Gil Bailie, shares a piece of advice given to him some years back by a spiritual mentor, Howard Thurman:ĭon’t ask yourself what the world needs. Like a master fly fisherman, God cast his fly to this cruising trout. I’ll be browsing through a secondhand bookshop when out of a thousand volumes one will say, “Pick me up”-just like Augustine in his Confessions. But he’s got an especially humorous thing going with me and books. God’s word to me comes in many ways-through sunsets and friends and films and music and wilderness and books. To Craig he speaks through rock and roll (he called me the other day after listening to “Running Through the Jungle” to say he was fired up to go study the Bible). God is intimately personal with us and he speaks in ways that are peculiar to our own quirky hearts-not just through the Bible, but through the whole of creation.
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