Richard Bolles - What Color Is Your Parachute?

b) in those place(s) or setting(s) that God has caused to appeal to you the most,

c) and for those purposes that God most needs to have done in the world.

It is customary in trying to identify this part of our Mission, to advise that we should ask God, in prayer, to speak to us—and tell usplainly what our Mission is. We look for a voice in the air, a thought in our head, a dream in the night, a sign in the events of the day, to reveal this thing that is otherwise ( it is said ) completely hidden. Sometimes, from just such answered prayer, people do indeed discover what their Mission is, beyond all doubt and uncertainty.

But having to wait for the voice of God to reveal what our Mission is, is not the truest picture of our situation. St. Paul, in Romans, speaks of a law “written in our members”—and this phrase has a telling application to the question of howGod reveals to each of us our unique Mission in life. Read again the definition of our third Mission (above) and you will see: the clear implication of the definition is that God has alreadyrevealed His will to us concerning our vocation and Mission, by causing it to be “written in our members.”We are to begin deciphering our unique Mission by studying our talents and skills, and more particularly which ones (or one) we most rejoice to use.

God actually has written His will twice in our members: first in the talents that He lodged there, and second in His guidance of our heart , as to which Talent gives us the greatest pleasure from its exercise (it is usually the one that, when we use it, causes us to lose all sense of time).

Even as the anthropologist can examine ancient inscriptions, and divine from them the daily life of a long-lost people, so we by examining our talentsand our heartcan more often than we dream divine the Will of the Living God. For true it is, our Mission is not something He willreveal; it is something He has alreadyrevealed. It is not to be found written in the sky; it is to be found written in our members.

Arguably, our first two Missions in life could be learned from religion alone—without any reference whatsoever to career counseling, the subject of this book. Why, then, should career counseling claim that this question about our Mission in life is its proper concern, in any way?

It is when we come to this third Mission, which hinges so crucially on the question of our Talents, skills, and gifts, that we see the answer. If you’ve read the body of this book, before turning to this section, then you know without my even saying it, how much the identification of Talents, gifts, or skills is the province of career counseling. Its expertise, indeed its raison d’être , lies precisely in the identification, classification, and (forgive me) “prioritization” of Talents, skills, and gifts. To put the matter quite simply, career counseling knows how to do this better than any other discipline— includingtraditional religion. This is not a defect of religion, but the fulfillment of something Jesus promised: “When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth” (John 16:12). Career counseling is part (we may hope) of that promised late-coming truth. It can therefore be of inestimable help to the pilgrim who is trying to figure out what their greatest, and most enjoyable, Talent is, as a step toward identifying their unique Mission in life.

If career counseling needs religion as its helpmate in the first two stages of identifying our Mission in life, then religion repays the compliment by clearly needing career counseling as itshelpmate here in the third stage.

And this place where you are in your life right now—facing the job-hunt and all its anxiety—is the perfect time to seek the union within your own mind and heart of both career counseling (as in the pages of this book) and your faith in God.

It is a mystery that we cannot fathom, in this life at least, as to why one of us has this Talent, and the other one has that; why God chose to give one gift—and Mission—to one person, and a different gift—and Mission—to another. Since we do not know, and in some degree cannot know, we are certainly left free to speculate, and imagine.

We may imagine that before we came to Earth, our souls, our Breath, our Light , stood before the great Creator and volunteered for this Mission. And God and we, together, chose what that Mission would be and what particular gifts would be needed, which He then agreed to give us, after our birth. Thus, our Mission was not a command given preemptorily by an unloving Creator to a reluctant slave without a vote, but was a task jointly designed by us both, in which as fast as the great Creator said, “I wish” our hearts responded, “Oh, yes.”As mentioned in an earlier comment, it may be helpful to think of the condition of our becoming human as that we became amnesiac about any consciousness our soul had before birth—and therefore amnesiac about the nature or manner in which our Mission was designed.

Our searching for our Mission now is therefore a searching to recover the memory of something we ourselves had a part in designing.

I am admittedly a hopeless romantic, so of course I like this picture. If you also are a hopeless romantic, you may like it, too. There’s also the chance that it just may be true. We will not know until we see Him face to face.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than that of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work a) that you need most to do and b) the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you haven’t only bypassed a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft birth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

FRED BUECHNER

Wishful Thinking—A Theological ABC

Excerpted from Wishful Thinking—A Theological ABC by Frederick Buechner, revised edition published by HarperOne. Copyright © 1973, 1993 by Frederick Buechner.

Your unique and individual Mission will most likely turn out to be a mission of Love, acted out in one or all of three arenas: either in the Kingdom of the Mind, whose goal is to bring more Truth into the world; or in the Kingdom of the Heart, whose goal is to bring more Beauty into the world; or in the Kingdom of the Will, whose goal is to bring more Perfection into the world, through Service.