Ooze

Some books on vocation or calling will explain ways to hear God’s voice, so as to know God’s will for your life. Others will try to help you hear your own inner voice of desire and gifting. And some will combine the two, telling you that your inner voice is God’s voice. What many of them often don’t tell you is that you will never arrive. This is a project with no conclusion. The chalk-written home décor sign you pinned last week is true: the journey is, in fact, the destination.
It may be that you discover a meaningful career you love early on and stick to it, but you will still continue to search for who you are outside of that job. It may be that you have a good sense of who are but jump from job to job like a frog, well, I want to say hopped up on sugar. Either way, and any way in between, you will never arrive.
The trick, which is a constant journey in itself, is to be content to journey, to search, to live in between. You may as well because that is where you will always be and, as Parker Palmer learns, if you can’t get out of it, get into it. Rubem Alves writes that he prefers the sea to the harbour. I think that’s fantastic. I, however, prefer the harbour, but I also know that it doesn’t exist in this world. It’s a temporary illusion and the only way it is possible to be is at sea. We may travel alone, or we may travel, for a time, with others. But the idea of a harbour exists simply to motivate us to travel, either in order to leave it or to search for it. The more fiercely we cling to the hard lines of the harbour the more it will eventually dissolve through our fingers under the pressure. The unheard rhythm and chaotic harmonies of the primordial water are enough to carry and guide us all.

image by me