Living with purpose

The emails today were not encouraging.  Seems the economy in Oregon is not improving, and so the state budget is once again going to get cut, which means that my mental health clinic will have even less funding to work with.  It feels like we are already trying to do way too much with way too little.

It is in times like this that I wonder,  "why am I doing this?"  Is this really how I want to spend my final years of employment?  Could this possibly be what God has in mind for me and my life?  If so I have a few choice words for God....

I went to a walk, and tried to have compassion on myself, and then I picked up Barbara Taylor Brown.  Lucky me, the chapter I came to was one on vocation.  God works in mysterious ways.  

Taylor talks about her own struggle to find her calling, and tells of time, while in graduate school, on a night when her "heart was open to hearing from God" she heard God clearly speak.  "Do anything that pleases you."  She that she was hearing things.  "What kind of an answer is that?"  But the voice in her head persisted.  "Do anything that pleases you, AND belong to me."

That's pretty cool actually.  It reflects the fact that it is not what we do, as much as how we do it.  If we do it as God's child, as one loved and forgiven by God.  If we do it in gratitude for what God has done for us...  Then out work, whatever it is, has meaning.  So often we are so busy looking for meaning for jobs that we fail to find meaning in our jobs.  In what we do, day in and day out.

How do I find meaning in fighting budget cuts, doing administrating tasks, driving up and down the freeway, going to meetings.  How do I get beyond just "doing" my job and make my job a matter of living with purpose?

It is by being God's person in each moment.  By being what Taylor calls "fully human."  She defines that this way.  "To become fully human means learning to turn my  gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good.  It means growing gentler toward human weakness.  I means practicing  forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures.... It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis to attend to the others selves in my vicinity."  

This past weekend I was telling some friends that I get so wrapped up in "doing my job" that I fail to be present to others and feel somewhat like a ghost, floating through the halls of the clinic.  Taylor talks about this too, and says that we can become so intent on our work, and on trying to do Gods work that we actually disengage from our situations, from the people around us, even from our unhappiness, and become "like ghosts going through the motions of the people they once were but no longer wish to be."

Ouch.  I want to combat the ghostliness.  I want to be "fully human" and do what I do as one engaged.  As one who dares to be engaged because I am a child of God, love and forgiven.