To follow your gift is a calling to a wonderful adventure of discovery. Some of the deepest longings in you is the voice of your gift. The gift calls you to embrace it, not to be afraid of it.*
(John O’Donohue)

The best way I can describe your gift is as your deepest joy meeting the world’s greatest need.**

We are all participating in an infinite game, though we may be unaware of this.

We are not the originators of the gift.

It has come to us through many others and we get the opportunity to shape it into something that is different.

And we look for opportunities to give it to others.

Helping them to shape their gift …

… and on it goes.

The infinite game asks a bigger question of us.

Not so much “What do you do for a living?”

More “What do you live to do?”

Except the universe can’t ask the question directly.

It asks it through us, its offspring, as we make our way through life.

Erich Fromm touches on this when he writes about hope, how it’s something we get to shape for ourselves and share with others, but neglect:

Whatever we say or think about hope, your inability to act or plan for life betrays our hopelessness.^

I’m not sure which comes first.

Does the gift produce hope?

Or does hope produce the gift?

I put it this way because I think it feels like it’s happening in an ongoing way rather than has happened, rather than waiting to happen.

I find myself wondering, What do I want to be when I grow up?

I’m still on the road, still walking.

Walking alongside any whom I meet along the way and can walk alongside, sharing my gift.

Probably why I’d choose direction over destination.

*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes;
**This is necessarily subjective; I am reminded that the early Jesuits all thought the thing they were doing to be the most important thing in the whole world: see Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership;
^From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.

(My first attempt at a doodle for today)