It sounds like an obvious statement, but who I am and what I do are totally different things. It’s plain to all people that what they do is a big part of who they are but it is not the bare bones essence that makes up who a person is.
A doctor may spend a lot of time doing things a doctor does, but I guarantee you that if you asked him, he would tell you his name and what he enjoys as well as what he does for a living. He is more than his profession.
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What’s funny about humans is that we both acknowledge that we are different than our jobs in the way we speak, but we also spend so much time chasing after things to tell us who we are. For my entire life, I have followed (or been followed by) this vague dream fluttering around in my imaginations, as if my only capacity of design was to reach it. Like a robot hardwired to annihilate the human race, my hardwiring told me to be someone that people want to be.
I’m coming to realize that the robot’s intentions and my own are not too far apart. In recent years, I have come to see, like everyone else my age, that when life begins to pan out, dreams begin to look less like you planned. What you once had so much confidence in, you now have to find direction outside of. This sounds like something most everybody knows, but it is a difficulty that is very real.
Last night, I was in the backseat of a parked car discussing a teaching that two of my friends heard. The teaching says that your calling and your identity are drastically different things and can be lethal when thought of as one entity. For example, I am a college student and I have two years left until I graduate. But if in my mind I believe myself to only be a college student unable to make any impact outside of the sphere I am in, then I will never leave the circle that I have confined myself to. I could say, well I’m only a college student so I don’t have to think about that yet. Or I could say, though I’m a college student, I have a future that I must live into after I am finished so I’m going to start thinking this through this now.
One sees my position as the limit of my influence. One sees my position as the current season of my influence.
We all know that time is anything but consistent. Things change. Constantly. What we are doing now is maybe what we’re doing tomorrow, but who knows about the day after that. My entire life I have thought of myself within the context of my one dream, always behaving towards people as if I knew where I was going. Now that I am in the new morning after a long night of dreaming, I wake up to see that dreams, even if they are achieved, never pan out like you think they do and there is a lot of space where you are not actively in that dream.
My design is bigger than one profession, one calling, one season, one day, one moment, one skill, or one future. My intricacies were designed by the One who made everyone else’s intricacies and He said once-and-for-all who I am so He can say today and tomorrow and the next day what I do.
