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Dr Geoff Pound

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Barbara Brown Taylor on Discernment

Thomas Long shared this story on 30 Good Minutes:

The Christian writer, Barbara Brown Taylor, tells in one of her books about a time in her life when she was struggling mightily with a sense of call. She simply could not figure out what it was that God wanted her to do and be. Did God want her to be a writer? Did God want her to be a priest? Did God want her to be a social worker? Did God want her to teach? She simply didn’t know. And in her frustration and exasperation, one midnight, she says, she fell down on her knees in prayer and said: “Okay, God. You need to level with me. What do you want me to be? What do you want me to do? What are you calling me to do?” She said she felt a very powerful response, God saying, “Do what pleases you. Belong to me, but do what pleases you.”

She said it struck her as very strange that God’s call could actually touch that place of her greatest joy, that she could be called to do the thing that pleases her the most.

Source: Thomas Long, "Where You Never Expected to Be", Program #5004, 30 Good Minutes, First air date October 22, 2006.

Tim Russert: Journalism is a Vocation

CNN, on Larry King Live, had a special edition on the day (13 June 2008) that journalist Tim Russert died entitled ‘Journalist Tim Russert is Remembered’.

During this hour of reflection by many of his colleagues King played this video excerpt of Tim Russert’s thoughts about being a journalist:

“We are surrogates for the American people. Very few places in the world have the kind of protections, particularly the Constitutional protections, we have in this country as a free press. And we have an obligation for all those men and women who work hard all week long in real jobs that when they turn on CNN or turn on NBC, or pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio, they realize that someone else is working as hard as they are trying to get to the truth. And it is not an easy job, but you know what, Larry, it is the best one you could ever have. It is a vocation being in journalism.”

One might wonder when and how Russert developed this notion of vocation. In an ‘On Faith’ interview sponsored by The Washington Post and Newsweek (18 May 2007), he revealed the secret:

“Let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
--John F. Kennedy January 20, 1961

“I was ten years old when I heard those words. They still resonate with me nearly a half century later. Am I doing God’s work? Is being a journalist my vocation? How does my faith influence my judgment as a reporter? Should it? Are the demands of my chosen profession leaving enough time for my responsibilities as a son, brother, husband, father and friend?”

Russert had headed this article with the important question, ‘Am I doing God’s Work?’

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: “Am I doing God’s work?”

Related:
Tim Russert on Lifting Others Up
Tim Russert on America
Tim Russert on Fatherhood and Family
Tim Russert: ‘Always Loved, Never entitled’

J K Rowling on Parental Expectations

The prize-winning author tells Harvard students at their Commencement exercises about coping with the pressures of parental expectations:

“I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.”

“They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.”

“I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.”

“I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience.”

J K Rowling’s entire address is posted at: Harvard Magazine, June 2008.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: J K Rowling

Related:

J K Rowling on Giving a Commencement Address

Muhammad Yunus: Falling Back on Instinct

In his address to graduates at MIT’s 2008 Commencement, Muhammad Yunus speaks about the importance of following your instinct in the absence of a road-map:

“I had no idea whether my life would someday be relevant to anyone else's. But in the mid-seventies, out of frustration with the terrible economic situation in Bangladesh I decided to see if I could make myself useful to one poor person a day in the village next door to the university campus where I was teaching.”

“I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. Out of necessity I had to find a way out. Since I did not have a road-map, I had to fall back on my basic instinct to do that. At any moment I could have withdrawn myself from my unknown path, but I did not. I stubbornly went on to find my own way. Luckily, at the end, I found it. That was microcredit and Grameen Bank.”

The entire Commencement address is posted at:

‘The Upside Down Thinking of Muhammad Yunus, Stories for Speakers and Writers, 10 June 2008.

Related:
Muhammad Yunus on Poverty

Muhammad Yunus on Changing the World

Muhammad Yunus: Success by Unconventional Wisdom

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “I had to fall back on my basic instinct.”

Stephen Covey on How I Found My Calling

Stephen Covey shares his journey of vocational discovery:

"It was understood that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and join the family business after college, but that plan changed during my mission, a period of missionary work undertaken by every young Mormon. "

"I was 20 years old and serving in Great Britain when my mission president asked me to lead a seminar to train the local leaders of the church. The leaders were 40, 50, and 60 years old. I said, 'I can't do this. There's no way.'"

"But my mission president told me that he had complete faith that I could do it and eventually persuaded me to take it on. He helped me prepare for the event, and it ended up going extremely well. I found I experienced a great deal of satisfaction from extending myself and really helping other people change their lives. That, to me, was so much bigger than going into business that I knew that I'd found my calling—I wanted to be a teacher, helping people to have happier, more successful lives."

Source: Jack Canfield & Gay Hendricks, ‘Stephen Covey,’ You’ve Got to Read this Book! (New York: Collins, 2007), 228.

Image: Stephen Covey

‘One Step Forward, Please!’

I had some currents of revelation recently on the topic of discernment.

I was ‘standing up to the plate’ at a urinal in the toilets of the Shanghai airport. I looked above, saw this sign (pictured) and dutifully, stepped forward.

While meditating on this sign, some truth trickled into my mind and then came as a pleasing rush: usually in discerning the way and making decisions about life, the most we are called to do is to take the next step. To take the step that is right before us. The step in front of our nose.

We are not always given a one or a five year plan of the way ahead.

So ‘One Step Forward, Please!’ might be the message that is flowing to you today.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: Isn’t it amazing the places where truth can be found?

Benazir Bhutto on Destiny

Sometimes events and responsibilities are thrust at us rather than being things that we choose.

This is most evident in the life of former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.

In her autobiography, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography, Bhutto writes of her personal sense of destiny when she takes the oath of office in 1988, at the age of 35—the first woman Prime Minister elected in the Muslim world:

“I had not asked for this role, I had not asked for this mantle. But the forces of destiny and the forces of history had thrust me forward, and I felt privileged and awed.”

Source: Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 392.

A review of this book is posted at Reviewing Books and Movies.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: Benazir Bhutto.