By Amy Butler
What am I meant to do with my life? What am I called to do? What is the deep and real meaning and purpose of my life — my destiny, the reason I was created in the first place, the deep gladness of my soul, my purpose for living?
I think about these questions a lot, and I always have. I trace this trend back to well-intentioned adults kindly asking me when I was very young: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and to youth Sunday school lessons admonishing students to find “God’s plan for your life.”
Nobody who introduced these concepts to me, I am sure, had any awareness of the seeds of anxiety they planted in my young, tender, impressionable mind. But ever since, the tenacious plant of “finding my purpose” has grown and grown, sometimes so quickly and prominently that it might have even choked out possibilities lingering around the edges — the ones that weren’t sensible or realistic or acceptable.
I swear I wasn’t joking in seventh grade when I wrote that essay about wanting to be a police officer.
I am sure what fueled my recent round of speculation on this matter was a meeting I had last week with my rising high school senior son and his guidance counselor. We met in her office to talk about the process of applying for college, to go through the list of all the (considerable) work we need to undertake this summer to get ready.
When she asked “Where do you want to go to college?” and got an “I don’t know” answer to her question, the counselor looked over at my son and asked with some exasperation: “Well, what do you want to do with your life?”
“What does he want to do with his life?” I want to interrupt. “Don’t ask him that! He’s only 17! How could he possibly know?”
But I don’t interrupt; I decide I’ll just tell him later. And, here’s what I tell him — speaking as much to myself as I was to him: “You don’t have to know right this very minute what the rest of your life will look like. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s at the very least rather stupid to entertain the notion that you can know anything like that for sure — and probably rather arrogant to presume you can.”
And, this I am coming to believe more and more the older I get.
So, ask away, I tell him. But don’t beat yourself up if you can’t articulate an answer right this very minute. Because in the middle of all this excitement, as you dream of possibilities and potential, I want to be sure my high school senior knows that these are questions to ask now, but they are also questions to ask forever — at every step along the way, at every turn in life’s road, at each new stage — no matter how old you are.
And it’s just here that faith features rather prominently for me. In contrast to what I learned in youth Sunday school, I just don’t think it’s the best use of my time and energy to search and search and search until I find “God’s plan for my life” — you know, the one and only plan that I have to identify exactly or I will miss it altogether.
Rather, the life of faith introduces and reintroduces me to a God who is always imagining new things for my life, for this world. In God’s eyes the possibilities for creative expression and new possibility are the things that stay static, but there is always something up there on the horizon waiting to be born, some new life looking for a willing, faithful place to gestate.
My work, instead of searching desperately for the exact right answer, is to stay open and receptive to whatever may come, no matter how ridiculous it might seem.
What do you want to do with your life? What do I want to do with my life? Hmmm, good questions for pondering, but I’m not so sure there are easy, cut and dried answers to be had.
No, I suspect this is one of those areas of holy curiosity whose “answer” is always in the process of revealing itself. In fact, it may very well be that the process itself is where the questions are ultimately addressed with the most clarity.
Or, more questions could come up.
I don’t think I am the only one still wondering. Poet Mary Oliver is much further along than I and she is still asking, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
It seems to me that living life with an openness that allows myriad answers to that question takes much more courage than setting one course and never considering any other.
Does anybody know if the police force is hiring?