What Color Is Your Parachute? (57 page)

You have not behaved at your most noble, recently. And now you are face to face with someone who asks you a question about what happened.
Decision time.
In your mind’s eye you see two spiritual roads lying before you: the one leading to less honesty in the world (you lie about what happened, or what you were feeling, because you fear losing their respect or their love), the other leading to more honesty in the world (you tell the truth, together with how you feel about it, in retrospect).
Since you know this is part of your Mission, part of the reason why you came to Earth, your calling is clear. You know which road to take, which decision to make.

It is necessary to explain this part of our Mission in some detail, because so many times you will see people wringing their hands, and saying, “
I want to know what my Mission in life is
,” all the while they are cutting people off on the highway, refusing to give time to people, punishing their mate for having hurt their feelings, and lying about what they did. And it will seem to you that the angels must laugh to see this spectacle.
For these people wringing their hands
, their Mission was right there, on the freeway, in the interruption, in the hurt, and at the confrontation.

At some point in your life your Mission may involve some grand
mountaintop experience
, where you say to yourself, “This, this, is why I came into the world. I know it. I know it.”
But until then
, your Mission is here in
the valley
, and the fog, and the little callings moment by moment, day by day. More to the point, it is likely you cannot ever get to your mountaintop Mission unless you have first exercised your stewardship faithfully in the valley.

It is an ancient principle, to which Jesus alluded often, that if you don’t use the information the Universe has already given you, you cannot expect it will give you any more. If you aren’t being faithful in small things, how can you expect to be given charge over larger things? (Luke 16:10–12; 19:11–24). If you aren’t trying to bring more gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, honesty, and love into the world each day, you can hardly expect that you will be entrusted with the Mission to help bring peace into the world or anything else large and important. If we do not live out our day-by-day Mission in the valley, we cannot expect we are yet ready for a larger
mountaintop
Mission.

The valley
is not just a kind of “training camp.” There is in your imagination even now an invisible
spiritual
mountaintop to which you may go, if you wish to see where all this is leading. And what will you see there, in the imagination of your heart, but the goal toward which all this is pointed:
that Earth might be more like heaven. That human life might be more like God’s.
That is the large achievement toward which all our day-by-day Missions
in the valley
are moving. This is a
large
order, but it is accomplished by faithful attention to the doing of our great Creator’s
will
in little things as well as in large. It is much like the building of the pyramids in Egypt, which was accomplished by the dragging of a lot of individual pieces of stone by a lot of individual men.

The valley, the fog, the going step by step, is no mere training camp. The goal is real, however large.
“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in heaven.”

Your third Mission here on Earth is one that is uniquely yours, and that is:

a)
to exercise the Talent that you particularly came to Earth to use
—
your greatest gift that you most delight to use,

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 us
plainly 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
how
God 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
already
revealed 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 talents
and
our heart
can
more often than we dream
divine the Will of the Living God. For true it is, our Mission is not something He
will
reveal; it is something He
has already
revealed. 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, and 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—
including
traditional 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
its
helpmate 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.